Jaime here again with the second part on Murderous Pursuits’ conversation and dialogue systems.

If you haven't ready part one, click here to read it! 

Last time we went over the thinking behind using Simglish in the game, as well as some of editing and processing that went into it. Now let’s talk about how it works inside Wwise, the audio middleware solution we used. Firstly, here’s the hierarchy for the conversation container to give you a quick overview of what it contains.

Then at the top is a Switch Container, VOX_CharConvo, which is used to set which character should be talking, and the named Switch Container selects which type of Simlish or conversation audio we want to be played. In this case, I’ve branched out the Brute’s: VOX_BruteConvo. Each of the conversation types are contained in a Random Container, which allows us to randomly select an audio file from a group of sounds when an audio event is triggered.

However, as you might have guessed with the references to them above, the Neutral, Positive and Negative containers are a little different. We need these to not just pick a file at random, but also between Simglish phrases of varying lengths and words, while maintaining the flow of conversation. Picking a random phrase type or word is pretty simple, we just use more Random Containers. As for the actual flow, that took a little bit more refinement. Here’s the Property Editor of the Brute’s Neutral Convo container:

 

There are a few things going on here. First is the Initial Delay setting.

 

This is used as a basic starting offset for the looping animation, with the randomizer being used to pick a value. Nothing fancy.

Next, the Play Type.

 

This is set to randomly pick one of the 6 possible options in the Neutral Container. In normal usage we’d want to avoid repeating previous audio clips that have been played to avoid the “machine gunning” repetition effect. Here though, we want to hit any of the sub-containers even if they’ve already been used. This helps mask the transitions between each type, and allows for more dynamic and varied conversations.

Play Mode is set to Loop Continuously.

 

They’ll keep talking until we trigger an event to tell them to stop, such as someone else piping up to speak, or reacting to someone being murdered nearby. We don’t want monologues after all, even if the Admiral could spout one easily. The Transition Delay is set between 0 and 0.4 seconds when the random offsets are accounted for, giving the characters a little bit of a breather outside of any natural gaps and pauses in their phrases.

We initially tried cross fading between each clip, but that felt more like a stream of audio and not quite natural enough in practice. There’s also a little bit of silence at the end of each Question snippet of Simglish which, combined with the actors’ inflections, helps create a more natural flow to their conversations by letting it hang in the air a little.

Finally, the weightings.

Characters are slightly more biased towards Simlish, as we wanted each word to pop and minimize the potential for a string of words occurring while not removing it entirely.

Outside of the playback settings each Random container has two silent audio clips using Wwise’s Wwise Silence. These are also varied in length depending on which container they’re in and introduce additional pauses in speech to reduce fatigue and make the conversation flow more naturally. There’s also a chance for multiple silence clips to be triggered in a row, but that’s okay. Not everyone has the stamina to talk for a while.

Here’s how the whole thing sounds for a single character in Wwise: