I would love to have voices launch with the release of the game, but it isn't going to happen. Doing voice acting would add many additional months to game creation. You have the following points to consider:

1. There are a lot of NPC's who need voices.--- Not many people can voice act well, its a sad reality. Those who can do voice acting oftentimes can't make their voice change significantly enough to do more than one or two characters. This means we would need to audition, in order to get a good group to work with, hundreds of voice actors. From this list we could narrow it down to those who have voices that could work in game. Generating a base of a couple hundred people willing to do voice acting for free is hard.

2. There is a lot of dialogue.--- each NPC requires pages upon pages of dialogue. To create just a single line of good voice dialogue requires rerecording the same lines at least a dozen times. When I did voice acting for the SSS project, I had appx 8 lines, and it took me a couple days to get them right. And even then, they were not up to the standard I would expect in hero6.

3. Equipment.--- very few people have access to professional recording devices and software. In order to do professional voice acting, you have to be able to use a microphone that costs a couple hundred dollars and use a program that costs twice that. Even if someone had a good voice and would be perfect, they can't pick up a mic at BestBuy and use Windows recording software to record their lines. The lines need to be completely clean.

4. Coordination.--- Normally, if there is dialogue between multiple people, they record them at the same time in the same room, that way they can respond to each other naturally. To try to coordinate, for example, NPC A interrupting NPC B, and having NPC C laugh at them, would be nearly impossible if we wanted to make it sound natural.

I would L-O-V-E to hear voices in hero6. However, If they are done improperly, they could potentially ruin the game. The only way they could be in the game is if we were able to do them to a high standard which would ABSOLUTELY add to the game and in no way detract from it. Sorry guys, I hate to bust your bubbles. This is why we decided long ago that we would only try to add voices later, and only if we could do them well enough to sound professional.

Nice to see you around Ianfe.

Now everyone play nice, or else I will unleash doom upon you all.

Sorry if we upset or worried anyone, but we really wanted to do something impressive for april fools. I think that everyone here is a light-hearted enough crowd to find amusement in our little prank. It started from a desire to release a fake game for you all to play, and we just worked the elaborate scheme of how to pull it off without it being obvious.

We do hope you enjoyed our game It took a few weeks to really put together from the ground up, and a lot of members worked very hard to make sure that it was completed on time.

I'd love to hear what everyone thinks now that the truth is revealed

The Hero6 team has been steadily trying to figure out how to prevent the absurd amount of spam hitting the forums recently. It is obvious that at the current time, we do not have the capabilities to handle these kinds of attacks.

Therefore, we are sorry to announce that we will have to temporarily pull the visitor section of hero6.

Rest assured that we should have a better system in place within a few days which will be capable of stopping this kind of behavior. The current system lacks the kind of control we need in order to manage this kind of behavior.

The new site should only take a couple days to set up, so make sure you keep checking to see when our new site will be up.

To our dear spammer- We'll see who gets the last laugh!

Erasmus- Plot Admin and Creative Leader, Hero6

Nobody mods meee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Anyway, I would love to DM. The problem is time. I would need:
A. Time to write the adventure
B. Uninterrupted time to run the adventure.

I'll tell you what. I'll write an adventure, then if I have time I'll let you all know and I can run it

Might take me a while to write one though. Right now I switched out of FR and into Eberron. I might be able to just dig up an old adventure I've run and see what happens.

And if we told you that, it wouldn't be a surprise!

(second post)

BTW, if people want the NWN campaign setting, what you really need is someone with good knowledge of the Forgotten Realms, since that is what NWN is in.


[edit by Swift] Man, this is priceless! I get to edit Erasmus' post for double-posting!  

As you have all now noted, our boards have been plagued by recent spam attacks from an unknown person. Some have commented on our inefficiency at deleting the posts in a timely manner. This is because in order to preserve a record of the IP address from which the posts originated, as well as to find any pattern at all in the posting, we must have the original posts to look at. Unfortunately this forum can not back up deleted posts.

Rest assured that we are all working on this matter and hope to reach a solution soon. Please just bear with us for the time being. Thanks.

Thanks Swift

Please keep in mind that the first two words of the description for this forum is "On-Topic"

Thanks for the compliment Hopefully some of our programming people will stop by for a response. Game creation takes many steps. Lets say you already have a plot and know what you want to do. First, you have to have a game engine. An engine is kind of like a program which will put together all your pieces of the game and play it. We use a member-developed engine called MAD. Once you have an engine, you need to draw out backgrounds and sprites. Backgrounds speak for themselves, they are the part of the screen that doesn't move. Sprites are any of the pieces of art that have to move or be animated. Once you have the drawings for a scene, you've got to program it. I'm not a programming guy, but in a nutshell you have to create scripts (programming lingo for instructions) which tell the engine how it should handle the art you've put in. This includes setting conditions, movement paths, etc. Then you enter in how sprites interact with each other. This means that the engine has to know what will happen when you click a key on a door, ie setting it from locked to unlocked. Lastly, you enter in the dialogue and descriptions, and script those into the engine so that doing something like clicking on an object will bring up a description.

Thats the most basic way I can think of describing the game creation process. Throw in a few good composers to set the mood with music and sound effects, and you've got yourself a game.

If you are interested in starting to learn how to do this kind of stuff, I'd suggest you start with learning how to program in BASIC, then moving on to C and C++. Once you are familiar with those, you can get into the kinds of programming needed to do more advanced work, such as games. I'll see if I can have a programer get you more info.

Your curiosity is appreciated    

To clarify what I meant by 95% done-

Without giving anything plot away, I'll break down what I estimate to be the percentage complete of each category:
Descriptions- 100%
Storyline- 100%
Main Quests- 99% (There may be another main quest added, but probably not, thus the 99%)
Sidequests- 94% (There are a few gaps that we're trying to fill with some more quests)
Dialogues- 10%

Dialogues are our major focus right now. They were nearly complete at one point, but a major revision had to take place. However, the time and effort it takes to write dialogue is minimal compared to the time it takes to develop the storyline and develop quests. Therefore, with all these factors in mind, I would say that plot, as a whole, is 95% complete, as in 95% of the total work needed before the release of the game has been done.

Fortunately, we are well ahead of the schedule that art and programming is on, so plot is "ahead of the game," so to speak.

I recieved several applications for new writers. However, I picked out only two applicants who had the best applications. One was a playwriting major and did professional writing, and the other was a professional editor. Unfortunately, both applicants disappeared after being accepted. I guess real-life caught up with them as well. At the moment I'm not reviewing any new apps, but I will let everyone know when it gets to a point where I can safely start looking for new writers.

Also, I wanted to add a note to Valiants report on our status. We've done a LOT of work this year, it is only the last two months that things have slowed down. This happened mostly because many of our artists got extremely busy in their lives, and weren't able to spend much time helping us out. Other members throughout the various departments also have had to take leaves of absence to their busy lives. This has left us with a skeleton crew trying to do the work. Hopefully things should speed up shortly, and a few members have been able to return to offer their services once more. We'll try to keep everyone updated with our progress. Rest assured, this past year has been extremely productive. In fact, probably the most productive ever. Lots of art, programming, music, dialogues, and descriptions were created and coded this past year. While we have experienced several slow points in our history, it can only be expected when we're working on a volunteer basis, especially since we have very high standards. Most of the people we get to work wind up getting jobs in the same field where they can get paid. That leaves us a little out in the cold. Hopefully we'll have some more to show you guys soon.

I'd have to be Erasmus