French Half-life! Created 17 years ago2007-07-02 09:02:00 UTC by splatzone

I just realized this today, that you can change the language in steam settings. So I did, and started half-life.

All the sounds are different (french) but what I found really odd was this:

The announcement system is completely different! It is no-longer a robotic voice speaking pre-recorded phrases, it's a lot of different human voices, speaking complete sentences!

Heres some samples:

http://rapidshare.com/files/40582567/c1a0_10.wav.html

C1a0_10.wav

http://rapidshare.com/files/40582848/ctr3.wav.html

Ctr3.wav

http://rapidshare.com/files/40582994/power_off.wav.html

Power_off.wav

I don't think it has the same charm as that robotic thing.

Now for sentences.txt!

The gman sounds weird too. Not scary at all, just a dull business man.

The suit has a robotic filter on it which ruins everything

The sounds are too long and don't match up with the scripted sequences sometimes.

Barney sounds the same as the scientists.

Scientists sound the same as the Gman

I think they only had 2 voice actors for this...

That is too funny. xD

Try German. It does the same thing as the French language.

Okay... downloading the German Half-life now...

Japanese doesn't work

Woah. That dubbing is AWFUL! And they say it with no emotion whatsoever!

I tried german.. it screw up the whole game!
The death animations of all monsters seemed to be gone.

If I shot a scientist or a barney they either sat down on the floor or just faded away..
If I killed a zombie it just faded.

Weird!

Its Germany. They don't like blood, gore and death animations in game, so they replace that animation with just fade out.

It does the same thing as the content lock option. In my opinion removing the blood and death stuff gives it a 'T' or '13+' rating...

Its Germany. They don't like blood, gore and death animations in game, so they replace that animation with just fade out.

Really? Wow, I didn't know that. What about the sounds of them getting hit by a crowbar?

EDIT: I guess all this was done when the game first came out; I'm gonna try episode one with different languages. They might've actually made a better attempt there.

There were still blood and gore around the bodies already on the ground!
(all the dead scientists and barneys in the beginning)

So, removing the animations on those who will die infront of the player just seems stupid..

Lol! I tried traditional chinese... it's freakin hilarious... the text unfortunately doesn't show, because my computer doesn't have chinese characters programmed in. =D Makes getting back to english hard.

Maybe they don't like seeing folk die? Maybe they don't mind if they're already dead.

w00t - 45 minutes download time until german episode 1 launches.

I wanna see what pre-existing sitting animation they choose for the combine!

EDIT: Hey, you know the other languages for hl1, did anyone else notice a different announcer? or was it just french.

Probably too hard for them to run the english text-to-speach program for foreign languages anyway.

what are you talking about? its not text-to-speech... the sentences.txt just tells half-life which sound to play...

When valve made the sounds for the english announcer, Im sure they used a text to speach engine.

I thought it would be too hard for them to adapt it for different languages.

The one on the train ride?

Open up your .GCF and look for the sounds. If you don't have GCFScape to open it, you can use WinRAR to open it too. In any case, ALL the sounds you hear, and alot you don't, are there.

It's not a text to speech engine. Some guy was recorded saying about 1000 words and they used a distortion filter on all of the files. You'd have to re-record the whole announcement system thingy for another language.

So why is there no credit for him?

And saw, I'm talking about the vox, not the train announcer.

EDIT: I'm gonna take a look at the steam forums, see if there's anything.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=6451259#post6451259

Here we go, the thread I just made. Couldn't see anything already so I made it.

Thats an interesting question. Ill keep my eye on that thread.

Great thanks. Something's up with the forum though (steam), if you've visited the thread why does the views value not increase? Does it only go up for logged in members?

EDIT: Cool! A Half-life 1 screenshot contest! I'm entering - 4 days to go...

Heh, I remember playing a mod with custom scientist and barney models and they had an animation called german_death in which they sat on the floor and shook their heads.

What a load of shit.

What mod was it?

Not sure. It may have been Sven-Coop with the Super Definition model pack.

It wasn't used in-game. It was just in the list of animations in MDLViewer

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=573519

45 minutes and still no replies...

Unless there's something up with the dates where I am, might have timezones mixed up...

I think it was a text to speech generator with some other effects laid over the top. Pretty basic stuff.

But the question is, which generator?

If we knew that, we could create our own announcements!

They probably made their own. However there are thousands of TTS generators on the Interweb they could have used and millions of effects they could have used to make it sound different. There is no way we can pinpoint the exact method they used.

BTW, This is my personnal favourite TTS generator and you will hear a lot of it in my mods.

It doesn't really matter which generator, the filter makes it sound terrible (in a good way) anyway. Try the AT&T one;

http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

EDIT: Damn you, beat me to it ;P

the old retail HL in Germany was so restricted that the Hgrunts were turned into robots. You can still find the robot model in HLDM

Already covered in another thread dude

A little bit fishy I just made a thread about it today...

Still no replys from my steampowered thread. I'm going to bed