Announcement - Warband Port - Led By Mad Vader

[Mad Vader]

There are advantages and disadvantages to public betas.
The good thing is that you'll see more bugs reported. The bad that it takes much more time to look through everything that's reported, and plenty of it is likely to be false alarms.

Closed betas are better when you have an experienced test team who knows POP 3.0 well, like we have now.

Like SD and Fawzia, I also prefer releasing a finished mod, I have played enough mods in beta (or worse) state to learn to dislike them.

 

[Sir William Kelland]

Well, when it comes i'm SOOO going to enjoy it! I wish i could play the new PoP release for M&B but now having windows 7 i can't so i'm stuck with warband.... which amazed me as to how boring it was!  Boring map, boring troops ... same old same old so i don't mind saying that i installed a whole load of PoP equipment to jazz up the troops and make a few new ones ... even pretty mutch replicating a few PoP troops ... like the D'Shar Windriders for a high level khergit troop and Valkyries for the Nords; Oh how i miss playing Prophesy of Pendor!!

By the way, if anyone can point me in the direction of a cool custom map for Vanilla Warband i'd be very grateful!  ... Did i mention the current one is very boring?

 

[akuthia]

umm i have no problems playing on win7...

 

[Sir William Kelland]

Say What?!! You playing PoP3 on Win7?! Oh crap i don't actually own M&B anymore 

 

[Fawzia dokhtar-i-Sanjar]

If you still have your key you can download V 1.011 again.  Also, we included a package for those who have Windows 7 64 bit which seems to have solved problems for those users.

 

[akuthia]

I didnt even need to use that package, i just turned textures down to somewhere around 50-75% and it runs fine for me.

 

[Templar_fan]

any chance of releases this weekend?

 

[Rojiru]

So what are some of the details you can release at this point in development about the port? I understand that when "porting" a mod from vanilla to warband it's mostly just a transitional procedure.

Will textures be updated to take advantage of the potential of the warband graphic limitations, or will everything from an aesthetic viewpoint stay roughly the same?

Spoiler

Thanks for the mod in vanilla as is, though. I'm really enjoying it - haven't gone back to warband since I discovered PoP. Very professionally done - but when I heard that the voices were professionally done I was shocked. I'm a professional voice actor (I won't point out any American commercials, but you've heard me if you watch television) and learning that the companion dialogues were recorded in studio is rather insulting judging by their quality.

 

[noosers]

@Tojitu´d late night Rojiru´s spoiler:

Some were recorded in a studio, and some weren´t. I wouldn´t consider an inbuilt laptop microphone or a cheap headset professional either but the outcome is rather satisfying and most people should enjoy it and even if they dislike it, it´s something else which makes PoP unique.

For detailed information, check the credits links and you´ll see which tracks were homemade and which were recorded in a studio.
And keep in mind, it was costly enough. Many thanks to the two generous donators. I like both the various voices and the catchy music tunes very much and the horn most of all closely followed by the notorious epic bagpipes.

 

[Rojiru]

Oi, Tojitu eh? lol

To response in reverse order:

I'm in absolute love with the ambiance created by the original music. If that was paid for I'd say that the quality shows.

Creating a fleshed out world full with voice over is a great goal, one that I've helped provide quality and professionalism with in past video game projects and etc. The tracks you say were recorded with a laptop microphone are fairly obvious, and it's those that I'm referring to when questioning the quality. It makes more sense now that you've pointed out my mistake in that.

 

[Fawzia dokhtar-i-Sanjar]

@Rojiru: Well don't just criticise what we did, send me a pm and volunteer to do better! (It'll have to be a freebie, as we have no more money for voice acting.)  If you can significantly improve some of the voices, I'd like a sample.  As per our voices, some lost a bit of quality in conversion to ogg format, but we had to do that for the game.  The original WAV format was better.  Ermine paid drama student voice actors of a variety of nationalities and also rented the Swiss recording studio.  Others of us on the team filled in when we did not have enough different voice actors for all we needed - I'd be pleased to have more different female voices, since I had to do too many.

Some original music - see credits - was licenced for pay by me from Shockwave Sound and also consists of  original compositions by people on the IGN Neverwinter Nights Archive.  One of the best, I think, of the IGN guys is Travis A Richards.  Our theme song for PoP 3 was donated to SD by Bobby Glorian - 7th Horn, and some of the tracks come from Knights of Honor, also composed by Glorian.  Others are by Justin R Durban, Edgen Productions (Kings & Kingdoms), and also the composer of music for The Witcher, whose name escapes me at present. 

Ambient sound is by me, Rejenorst (who did a lot of Native's stuff) and Adorno, all from either original or free sources.  We are the first mod I know of with a decent female voice pack for battle, too.

All this combined gave our mod an extremely unique quality.  I've paid money out for games with less-good sound and ambience.  You got PoP 3 for free.

 

[Rojiru]

Spoiler

@Rojiru: Well don't just criticise what we did, send me a pm and volunteer to do better! (It'll have to be a freebie, as we have no more money for voice acting.)  If you can significantly improve some of the voices, I'd like a sample.  As per our voices, some lost a bit of quality in conversion to ogg format, but we had to do that for the game.  The original WAV format was better.  Ermine paid drama student voice actors of a variety of nationalities and also rented the Swiss recording studio.  Others of us on the team filled in when we did not have enough different voice actors for all we needed - I'd be pleased to have more different female voices, since I had to do too many.

Some original music - see credits - was licenced for pay by me from Shockwave Sound and also consists of  original compositions by people on the IGN Neverwinter Nights Archive.  One of the best, I think, of the IGN guys is Travis A Richards.  Our theme song for PoP 3 was donated to SD by Bobby Glorian - 7th Horn, and some of the tracks come from Knights of Honor, also composed by Glorian.  Others are by Justin R Durban, Edgen Productions (Kings & Kingdoms), and also the composer of music for The Witcher, whose name escapes me at present. 

Ambient sound is by me, Rejenorst (who did a lot of Native's stuff) and Adorno, all from either original or free sources.  We are the first mod I know of with a decent female voice pack for battle, too.

All this combined gave our mod an extremely unique quality.  I've paid money out for games with less-good sound and ambience.  You got PoP 3 for free.

I won't pretend that I'm any good at female voices, but as for providing some freebie voicework elsewhere - well I've got no problem with working for projects of which I am particularly fond. I was sitting my daughter on my lap last night playing PoP reading Sigismund's tavern story out loud to her and thought about recording it for PoP, but wasn't sure the engine was capable of supporting VO for conversations. This was before I'd heard any other companion's voices.

Yeah, I'll send you some files - possibly even converted to .ogg and made crisp if I can find an option for it.

The amount of women combatants is a bit off-putting for a medieval setting, but at least it's consistent for the module and it does make sense - even adding to the sense of being in a unique fantasy world.

If you want a few samples of the freebie work I've done let me know. It might be a day or two before I've got time to record PoP stuff.

 

[Fawzia dokhtar-i-Sanjar]

Pendor is an equal-opportunity land when it comes to slaughtering enemies.  I got tired of all that sexist crap every lord, traveller, etc. spouts in Warband, and SD agreed, so we beefed the female population.  Did you run into the Daughers of Persinoe yet, the Veccavian ladies?

RE: Recordings, please take your time - I'll look forward to hearing them.  PM me what you want to record and I can forward the lines - they must match the written bits and I don't want to have to change the string again!  What you do would be for the Warband port, not PoP 3, and that is a ways down the road.  If you can round up some females of talent willing to record, please let me know.

 

[Ãbyss]

Did you run into the Daughers of Persinoe yet, the Veccavian ladies?.

Gals with balls.

~Ãbyss

 

[Fawzia dokhtar-i-Sanjar]

Actually, gals who want yours!

 

[Rojiru]

Pendor is an equal-opportunity land when it comes to slaughtering enemies.  I got tired of all that sexist crap every lord, traveller, etc. spouts in Warband, and SD agreed, so we beefed the female population.  Did you run into the Daughers of Persinoe yet, the Veccavian ladies?

RE: Recordings, please take your time - I'll look forward to hearing them.  PM me what you want to record and I can forward the lines - they must match the written bits and I don't want to have to change the string again!  What you do would be for the Warband port, not PoP 3, and that is a ways down the road.  If you can round up some females of talent willing to record, please let me know.

Haven't run into the ladies yet, as I was playing a very early beginning to an empire character and I don't know if they're even around. In fact I don't think they spawned. I'll be starting up a new character when I get the chance to play again due to 3.01's changes so we'll see.

Generally I'm not an advocate of beefing the female population for medieval settings (see discussions from my previous posts about the sex-toy armor models in the Blood and Steel mod), but in PoP 3 they mesh so incredibly well with the rest of the world. I won't get into the mechanics discussions as that's a bit more flavored and off topic than I think we're discussing here.

I'm fine with working for the Warband port - if that's where PoP feels comfortable going and it works well, then there will be no shame involved for me. =P 

Will send you a PM with email and lines wanted. I hope you don't mind if I take liberty with pronunciations, or did you have a specific accent in mind? Thinking of doing the story for Sigismund or other similarly manly men. Maybe the king of Ravenstern. *grunts*

 

[KingBread]

Please give us some info about working progress !

 

[Fawzia dokhtar-i-Sanjar]

Work on a PoP 3 port is to Warband in progress.

 

[KingBread]

Can you specify percentage done ? Or give a shot about premiere date ?

 

[akuthia]

no they cant, and if they can, they wont. please read EVERY other post about this subject and maybe you'd get the hint: it will be done when its done. if people keep asking, it might never get done.