Creation Kit – New Vanilla Dialogue

2013-10-23_00003First I want to mention I added a new volunteers section to the sidebar for anyone who’s interested in helping out. Basically right now the main thing I am looking for is wiki contributors, but I’m not going to say no to any talent of any kind, whether you want to provide blog stories or fan art and the like. I’ve already added an author – which means I need to figure out how to place a byline. First world problems.

As far as new content, I’ve gotten a little quest fatigue so I’ve returned to adding follower commentary. This can take a while though, because it requires playing Skyrim again, forcing myself to dungeon crawl instead of say, hunting antelope, then writing the lines, then waiting for them to get voiced.

Another thing I want to go back and do is add more scene interaction between vanilla and mod NPCs. Who I do this for will depend on actor availability, as well as how natural I can make the vanilla tracks sound. Splicing up lines can take hours to get right.

Most of these scenes have to be reverse engineered. For example, today I was playing around with having Ysolda speak to Larkspur, the former bandit. Rather than construct the scene and hope there was audio to match it, I just looked for a line that mentioned bandits, and built the conversation from there. This is the track – spoken by Muiri – that forms the basis for the conversation:

Of course, while there’s plenty of meat in this track, in order to make it work for the scene, I had to splice it together with two separate tracks so that Ysolda is addressing Larkspur directly instead of talking about Alain Dufont. This is the end result:

The tone of all three tracks in this situation is similar enough that the sentence flows smoothly. You can’t just pick any track from a specific actor, as the emotion and voice can change depending on the NPC. For example, Elisif’s tracks can’t be used for Ysolda, and vice versa. Either way, now I can build Larkspur’s dialogue around this.

In any case, more conversations that don’t involve the player always helps the surrounding environment feel more alive, and including vanilla NPCs helps integrate the mod ones into the world. It’s just given all the variables, it isn’t the easiest thing to do.

3 thoughts on “Creation Kit – New Vanilla Dialogue

  1. Actually, I took it specifically from a sentence where she says “your.” The trace “ffff” noise is probably the tail end of something like “your family” where the F got left in, or perhaps just a beat or hiccup caused by the splicing. Which is part of deal when taking a single word out of one track and trying to integrate it elsewhere. Unless you’re really paying attention to it closely, you’d never hear it.

    It took a ton of time just to find a word that sounded this good and matched in tone. Any more work and it’d be easier to kidnap the original actor.

  2. It’s Ok. From time to time, real people have… what’s the word in english… lapsus? Tongue-slidey-bitey-mispronunciations?

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