Voice acting in Space Quest V | Hacker News Reader

Voice acting in Space Quest V

github.com

107 pointselvis7041 comments

This is illegal in Tennessee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELVIS_Act

Possibly more places, I don't feel like figuring out the current state of laws against using AI to clone voices.

Are there any more in-depth resources for the rationale and debate behind this legislation?

I'm curious for the justification behind artists getting this special protection, but not the rest of the general population. Also why existing fraud legislation and civil suits were not considered sufficient.

> The inception of the ELVIS Act has been attributed to Gebre Waddell, founder of Sound Credit, who initially conceptualized a framework in 2023 that later evolved into the legislation.[5][6] Representative Justin J. Pearson acknowledged Waddell's pivotal role during the March 4 House Floor Session on the bill.[7] The act's development was a community-driven response, reflecting the collective initiative of the music industry to confront and address the challenges posed by rapid technological advancements

Sounds like artists got special protection because they asked for it.

And they asked nicely ($$$).

Well you spooked them, the link is 404.

It’s likely this comment killed a really cool project.

Anyone have a backup? This is legal in most parts of the world. Though it probably would have been easier and safer to just use completely synthetic voices.

Oh wow this immediately sent me back, haven't thought about this game in decades. The room I played it in, the computer (486/33 w/8mb ram?) the friend I learned about it from (terrible friend in retrospect, for unrelated reasons). Generally just loving the humor and ridiculousness of it. Definite Monkey Island vibes. Thank you for the trip down memory lane, felt good to have some reminders of the positive things from of that time in my life.

same used to play the heck out of this thing on an old CRT monitor

Yeah, me too. I think I was a teenager then. Good times!

I absolutely love this game. Probably my favorite of the series, immediately followed by Space Quest IV (the CD-ROM talkie version).

I agree.

I definitely loved Gary Owens as the narrator, though I've never seen Laugh in. The inclusion of the 'smell' and 'taste' "verbs" for no other reason than for laughs was also great.

Owens was familiar to those too young for Laugh-In through his other voice work, including playing Hanna-Barbera superheroes like Space Ghost and Blue Falcon, and Powdered Toast Man from the Ren & Stimpy series (in all appearances but his first). For Xers, hearing his voice in SQIV was a real "hey, it's that guy with that voice!" moment. His distinctive voice and wit made him the perfect adventure game narrator.

same i have the whole series on CD

Mine is SQ3 and then 4. :)

> Timing bug fixes

> Added Wait(1) to EVA pod minigame to limit FPS to 60 to prevent issues at higher cycle rates. The thrust level's doit method appears to be polled every possible cycle. (FloatObj)

When I originally played this (on a 16Mhz Mac LC) the quicktime events were all trivially easy because the game didn't adjust for the framerate. I guess this bites the other way when you run it on a modern machine.

It did on a machine from back then too, hence why PCs came equipped with a "turbo button", which were actually a "slow down" button to prevent issues with games made for a specific cpu speed.

Even with turbo set to the slower speed, on my Pentium the CD-ROM version of SQIV still ran too fast, with the sentry droid in the first area spawning every few seconds or so, making that area damn near unplayable.

The CD-ROM version of SQ4 was especially insidious. It has many timing issues that the floppy version just plain didn't have (including the one you mention). Also, the scan quality of the VGA backgrounds was just better in the floppy version, with a much better gamma curve, the CD version looking rather more washed out.

It's assume that the CD version was developed alongside the floppy version and that the code forked at some point. The floppy version got the fixes, whereas the CD version didn't.

Somebody in the retro adventure gaming community with the handle NewRisingSun made a patch that used the floppy disk background images and has patched script resources to solve the myriad timing issues, whilst integrating seamlessly with the speech of the CD version.

> the CD version looking rather more washed out

I remember reading somewhere many, many years ago that the graphics were adjusted to have less colors to work in Windows, which reserved 20/256 colors for system use.

I tuned in because as a kid i loved those sierra adventures. At first the voiceover sounded pretty good but within a few sentences i noticed something strange and it dawned on me this was AI generated. Considering voiceovers are a big thing for the adventure game community- usually requiring financial backing of some sort- i wonder…

Are peolple asking for voiceovers simply because they can‘t be bothered to read or do we knowingly or unknowingly expect more than that?

Has it already been taken down? I get a 404 when I visit

It seems that the github repository, the youtube videos, and the reddit post have all been deleted by the author.

EDIT: archive of the github readme at https://archive.is/NmIh7

They possibly received a cease & desist from a representative of one or more of the voices used. You can't just use someone's voice to train an AI without their express approval.

You just can't release your creation into the wild aka 'don't get caught'.

Worked at a "customer support" once and got peculiar about the strange audio interface they used. Turns out they recorded every support agent while all incoming calls were fake and the callers mood and words aimed at evoking emotional responses from the support agents.

Germany, all big telcos involved and even a huge advertiser. Big teeth, strong bite. Years prior a big shot lawyer tried to get them for something else. Had hard evidence (proof). He settled of course, which was a bit off-character for that guy but if you kept digging, you'd find the classic scheme with big financial institutions and even intelligence agencies involved.

They needed a good cause, of course, so rehabilitation & reintegration of youthful offenders as well as ADHD types in therapy (yes, such institutions were directly involved as well) and other 'not yet lost causes' were 'hired' and got paid quite well to get them hooked on monetary reward mechanisms for upselling while 'helping people who are seeking support', so one would naturally be inclined to say that it wasn't bad at all but the opposite, actually; and I would absolutely agree if I didn't think that the vision and leadership of high status people over an obedient FUBU mob through the coming hard times wasn't complete trash.

Especially while these soooo complex relationships in the middle east and in the 'defected' viking gene pools are creating "strong people" in the hard times and conditions in war zones who then emigrate to do anything at all cost in the countries they arrive in, feeding Mafia and gangs, lowering supply chain and product quality (aided by governments), increasing exposure to drugs and lowest-end-behaviours and language (think music, film, club culture) and on and on the list goes on ...

But hey, 'the candy man' was/is a thing, too. Natural selection, I guess, hahahaha.

Addendum: any productive, constructive people, especially 'good' ones who immigrate with bunches of bad and 'ugly' are worth the risk of increased negative social impact. The Social Body can handle it.

It's necessary to create counter-measures tho, because legal or illegal barely matters if it serves a big and influential enough interest-group, which nobody can be blamed for but if you don't get caught "nailing" some shady stuff to a wall, you're fine.

And it's never about 'then the next guy will take his place'. It's a cute bullshit narrative but not how balance and active balancing work.

Yup, they used and listed some pretty big names as well. Charles martinet is the voice of Mario, so I'm completely unsurprised. I'm honestly not sure what they were expecting.

I don't know what the state of the art is for completely synthetic TTS, so maybe the project will come back at some point.

    >Labor
    >Rough estimates.
    >
    >    ~100 Hours of work generating, selecting, splicing and cleaning audio files.
    >    ~30 Hours of programming with the SCI Companion.
    >    ~1/2 Hour on SCIProgramming.com.

And it's gone

I got the audio part, but didn't download the patches :(

Could you release a torrent for it? Maybe someone else has the patches

I'm not sure if I can. But if anyone else has the file, the hash is: 82c6658d53fa611273a4742ac824cc98196fd35e

Should be pretty magnetic :)

I forgot to nab the audio, but I have patches. Care to swap?

See the other comment below. Maybe you also have a hash of the patches? :)

I'll see what I can do. Hopefully I can magic a hash within the next day. ;)

Got a hash for the patches installer: 5ca7c8d557c0bebe986c8d912e5beb02c0851f03

Incidentally I tried reaching out to you via email, but your address appears to not work anymore.

Since this is not commercial, how does it interact with California AB 2602?

This is great! I played nearly all the Sierra games when I was a kid and currently showing playing them with my wife. The CD talkie versions are much easier to play together though so this is perfect!

Spqce Quest 5 is the only one I go back to. It’s funny, has well-written and memorable characters (for Space Quest), there are few unwinnable situations, and the puzzles rely mostly on human rather than adventure game logic.

On the other hand, it feels like the studio ran out of money while making it. There’s a ton of planets in the game you never visit, it’s not a talkie even though the game before was, and one of the last things you do in the game is a huge trial-and-error maze that is 100% pure padding.

404 now

This brought memories. I think I’ll play some Space Quest now.

Oh wait, can this be played in SCUMM VM?

Oh my god, I need to play SQ6 again

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