Additional Speech

Game Talk The Lab
1

Hello,

I am very tempted to add new speech lines for zombies and perhaps also animals. Before I do that I would like to know a few things:

  1. Is it sufficient to change only the speech.json?

  2. will it be totally game breaking if zombies make noise and are therefore attracting even more zombies?

  3. When are the speech lines triggered? Only when the player is around? Or if the monster can see the player? Or all the time?

Thank all of you in advance.

2
  1. no, you have to also update the monster entry to enable speech, though I think just those two things are sufficient.
  2. no, I’ve been planning on making ‘hunting’ zombies make noise to attract other zombies on purpose.
    2a. just had a thought, attacking ants should emit pheremones that attract other ants to attack as well.
    3q. if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, doe it make a sound?
    3a. in dda the answer is no, in reality consult your pineal gland.
3

+23 for the Discordian / RAW allusion. But also this is a fantastic idea.

4

So, after checking it out a little, I noticed, that speech is acutally enabled through the “special_attack” line, by adding “PARROT”?

If so, that could be problematic to add to zombies, as they need their special bite attack. Okay, just checked, apparently zombies don’t use their bite as a special attack. Other zombies and monsters do, however, so perhaps there could also be a different way of implementing advanced sound-making for monsters?

Also, the special_frequency for the mi-go is set to 0, yet I hear them talking all the time?

5

You’re not going to want to use the mi-go speech thing, works for it because it was designed without a special attack, but we obviously don’t want to remove special attacks to get monsters making noise.

Special_frequency is named badly, it should be special_cooldown.

6

Yeah, I thought so, still good to get confirmed.

Thanks for the clarification regarding special_frequency, that explains it.

So, for implementing speech or “noises” for most enemies one had to write a new c++ part?

7

yea, ideally we’d get a generic chunk of code that handles it for all monsters, having a speech type, frequency, maybe some behavioral things.