Difference between revisions of "Preparing a dialog for recording"

Revision as of 12:35, 16 January 2010

(this article is based on the investigations of Kaldir II and KingEtzel)

When you successfully have created dialogs in your toolset, you may want to send it out to voiceactors for recording at a certain point.

You could do that by writing all dialogs in a textprocessor like MS Word and just send them those documents. However, you would have to copy and paste the whole tree of lines into the toolset one by one, in order to get even the text work ingame. On the other hand you could type your whole dialog stuff in the toolset, but then - lacking a native export function - you would have to copy and paste again to get it into a form, where voiceactors can read your dialog.

Below we describe a way of creating the dialog inside of the toolset and then, by using little SQL queries, export not only the lines but also their corresponding LineIDs so that the voiceactor can not only match the format convention (24kHz, 16bit mono PCM), but also the naming convention for the files themselves (123_m.wav). The only thing for you left to do is putting those recorded files into the right folder (see Conversation#Recording_VO) and everything should work. No need for you to rename thousands of files manually to put them into the module/game!

First of all, you need Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express to be installed: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C243A5AE-4BD1-4E3D-94B8-5A0F62BF7796&displaylang=de

Then you start the tool for administering the database with administrator privileges (otherwise you won't be granted permission to access the database).

Click on "New query" and put in the text below. "Run" it afterwards to get the results you may need.

Find the String ID from one line of your conversation inside the toolset, and substitute it in this query:

  SELECT [StringID],[ModuleResRefVersionID]
    FROM [bw_dragonage_content].[dbo].[t_StringText]
    WHERE StringID = ####

After you get the ID number of your dialog (that's what we search in this first step), open a new query and substitute the acquired number in this query as well:

  Declare @ResID INT
  Set @ResID = #####
  SELECT A1.StringID, A2.SPEAKER, A1.Text
     FROM bw_dragonage_content.dbo.t_StringText A1, bw_dragonage_content.dbo.t_ConversationLine A2
     WHERE A1.StringID = A2.TextStringID AND A1.ModuleResRefVersionID = @ResID AND A2.ModuleResRefVersionID = @ResID

What you get is a list consisting of the LineIDs in the first column, who is speaking ("PC" or " "=OWNER), and the spoken words in column 3. You can now mark everything and save it into csv and reopen it with Excel.

Now you can send the script to your voiceactors and you have minimized unneccessary work!