[games_access] DCC questions from Matt

[Reid Kimball]

Hi Matt,

Where possible in time, budget and creativity I like captioning sounds
in the form of onomatopoeia
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia), the words read aloud
resemble how they sound (BANG, QUACK, MEOW). It's very expensive to do
this and takes a lot of creativity to figure how how an arrangement of
letters captures the sound.

The other way is simply to describe the sound as you suggested. With
that, you could use suffix captions for weapons to say shotgun gun
fire, assault rifle gun fire, etc. Or you can differentiate them as
shotgun blast, assault rifle burst, rocket grenade launch.

There's the possibility of captions being unfair, but only if the
sounds themselves are hard to discern which is which. If it's easy for
a hearing person to discern between a pistol firing and a
semi-automatic uzi, then using captions that make clear the difference
shouldn't be a problem in my opinion.

To denote when the sound is over, consider timing the visibility of
the caption with the length of the sound. When the sound starts, the
caption appears, when it stops, the caption disappears. Sometimes the
sound is so short the caption doesn't stay on screen long enough to be
read, then you'll have to keep it on screen longer and communicate in
some other way the sound has finished playing. This is unexplored and
has not been done in captioning for games yet.

-Reid

On Jan 4, 2008 9:29 PM, Matthias Troup <foreversublime at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Reid,
>
> A quick question before I call it an early night.
>
> Is it typical for [cc]'ers to use a standard set of keywords to identify
> sounds of like-origin throughout a game?  In an FPS, for instance, if
> certain sounds are specific to certain weapons does the caption read "gun
> fire" (for nearly every weapon) or "[x] gun fire" where [x] might be a
> keyword specific to a small automatic weapon?  That way it's understood what
> weapons enemies have just by the sound - and puts the disabled player on an
> even keel with others (in some cases it might be unfairly advantageous).
> Also, reloading sounds are unique and knowing when/which weapon is being
> reloaded is equally important "[x] reloads" - as well as making sure it's
> noted when that sound is over.  You wouldn't want to charge in on a guy
> thinking he's reloading if that sound finished a full second ago - changing
> the text from bright white to off-white could indicate sound completion.
>
> -Matt