Babbler

What is it?

This plugin aims to make NPC speech more immersive by having them "babble" (think Animal Crossing, or The Sims) when they talk. This can be either when they are talking near you or in direct conversations with them. There are configuration settings to control when and how they babble.

Installation

r2modman or Thunderstore Mod Manager installation

If you are using r2modman or Thunderstore Mod Manager for installation, simply download the mod from the Online tab.

Manual installation

Follow these steps:

1. Download BepInEx from the official repository.
2. Extract the downloaded files into the same folder as the "Shadows of Doubt.exe" executable.
3. Launch the game, load the main menu, and then exit the game.
4. Download the latest version of the plugin from the Releases page. Unzip the files and place them in corresponding directories within "Shadows of Doubt\BepInEx...". Also, download the SOD.Common dependency.
5. Start the game.

Usage and features

Features

• NPCs will have voices now, when they speak (either near you or to you), that speech will be something you can hear audibly, although it will be unintelligible babble.

Configuration

In r2modman you should see "Config editor" on the left, in the "Other" section. If you click on that and then open up BepInEx\config\Babbler.cfg and click "Edit config", you will have many options available to you to configure Babbler to your liking, we'll go over them briefly. Just click "Save" when you are done.

• Enabled: This can be set to false to disable the plugin entirely.
• Minimum Pitch: This is the lowest pitch a deep voice can play at.
• Maximum Pitch: This is the highest pitch a voice can play at.
• Syllable Speed: The more you raise this, the faster people will babble.
• Distort Phone Speech: By default phone speech has a band pass filter to make it sound like phone speech, if you want to turn this off, set this option to false.
• Conversational Volume: This goes from 0-1 and determines how loud people babble when they are speaking directly to you in a dialogue.
• Phone Volume: This goes from 0-1 and determines how loud people babble when they speak to you over the phone.
• Overheard Volume: This goes from 0-1 and determines how loud people babble when they talk near you but not necessarily directly with you.

License

All code in this repo is distributed under the MIT License. Feel free to use, modify, and distribute as needed. The license for the sounds in the sounds directory can be found in sounds/Attribution.txt.

CHANGELOG

Latest Release

0.9.6

• Added emote sound effects, that play when Babbler encounters emote speech like [Sigh] or [Clears Throat]. These come with over 80 sounds: burps, chuckles, throat clears, coughs, farts, gasps, heavy breathing, hiccups, sighs, sneezes, whistles, and yawns. They come in one theme for now: Realistic. You can also add your own themes, instructions are in the readme. They can also be disabled entirely.
• Abstract emotes that sound more like Animal Crossing or Oxygen Not Included will be coming in a future patch for those templates.
• Added a comprehensive audio occlusion system for Babbler speech and emote effects. This will adjust the volume and position of sounds coming through walls, doors, etc.
• Added some incidental emote sound effects that are not associated with dialog, described below.
• NPCs can now burp while eating, depending on their personality, whether they are home, and their drunkenness.
• NPCs can now fart in the restroom, depending on their personality, whether they are home, and their drunkenness.
• NPCs can now hiccup as they walk while drunk.
• NPCs can now chuckle and gasp while watching TV, depending on their extraversion.
• NPCs can now whistle in the shower, depending on their extraversion and creativity.
• Added a JSON file that can do string replacements on certain dialog lines to make them sound better. For example, changing brrr to burr for TTS engines to pronounce better. Instructions for adding your own replacements are in the readme.
• Configuring Babbler has become complicated, so I've added a Template option in the general settings. Assigning this value will reset all of your settings to one of several presets, like Text To Speech, Animal Crossing, Undertale, or Banjo Kazooie, without you needing to change all the options yourself.
• Fixed issue with ellipsis (...) causing dialog to not play.
• When shouting all caps, Babbler now converts the dialog to lower case. It will still play louder, but this will help stop TTS engines from interpreting words like WHO as acronyms.
• Babbler sounds are now affected by the Master SFX slider and the Other SFX slider in the options screen.
• Dialog was quieter than I remember it, so I've tweaked the default volumes a bit.
• Dependencies have been updated.
• Babbler has been recompiled against Shadows of Doubt 1.0.

0.9.5

• Fixed a bug with Synthesis that was causing 8 out of 11 of the default Windows voices to not be detected. If you use Synthesis and have all of the default Windows voice packs installed, you will see a huge bump in voice variety.
• Added options to Synthesis mode to create a whitelist or blacklist of speech synthesis voices. This allows you to block or allow certain voices if you want. Instructions for how to use these new options are down in the configuration section of the README.
• Fix individual citizens changing their voice characteristics if you close and open the game again. Voices stay persistent now.
• Added more aggressive detection of "emote text" that we don't want to speak, for example: (Heavy Breathing).
• Fixed a memory leak caused by Synthesis speakers not properly "pooling".
• Improved and hardened a config upgrade process that was throwing errors for some users.
• Updated SOD.Common to version 2.0.0.

0.9.4

• Updated SOD.Common to version 1.1.8.

0.9.3

• Fix Babbler behaving strangely during the intro "Dead of Night" scenes and cutscenes.
• Babbler now ignores player dialogue and player internal monologues.
• Patched spot where Babbler could rarely orphan a dialog speaker, which would cause it to spam errors.

0.9.2

• Force Babbler to load first, fixing crashes when Synthesis mode is active. This will cause the config file to be named "AAAA_Babbler" now.
• Babbler will attempt to rename your old config file to "AAAA_Babbler" to preserve any settings you set up in older versions.
• Made Synthesis the default option again, now that it no longer crashes the game with other mods installed.
• Added configuration options to Synthesis for minimum and maximum speech speeds, which are persistent from citizen to citizen.
• The "operator" on the phone, like when you call for numbers or enforcers now has a persistent voice. Their voice changes once every eight hours.
• If you walk away from the phone while talking to a person giving you a job, they now continue speaking with the right voice.
• If Babbler cannot locate the citizen speaking some dialog it will fall back to a random voice and print an error clearly now.

0.9.1

• Synthesis mode has an issue where it only works if Babbler is the only mod installed.
• Disabling it by default in favor of Phonetic mode until I can figure out why that is happening.
• It should still work if no other mods are installed, so I'm leaving the option in.

0.9.0

• Added Synthesis mode, which uses text to speech. This is now the default, because it's great.
• Added Droning mode, which is inspired by the speech in "Undertale". It's phonetic but only using one repeating syllable.
• Added eight more sets of phonetic voices, which work in both Phonetic and Droning mode.
• Added a lot of configuration options.
• Added a volume increase when NPCs "shout" in all caps.
• Fixed some errors the plugin was throwing by moving initialization of FMOD into the main menu.

0.8.1

• Fix Thunderstore breaking my directory structure, add some more sanity checks.

Initial Release

0.8.0

• Citizens now babble when they talk, whether it's straight to you, near you, or over the phone.