Let's talk about Indiana Jones & Fate of Atlantis

2 Likes

I don’t know, that guy seems a bit too smart.

He only thinks he´s smart, alcohol makes you self-concious.

I wish I could do the same. The closest I got in my recent playthrough of Fate of Atlantis was the realization that I’d either never played all the way through the Fists path, or forgot the puzzles unique to that particular path.

So years and years and years ago I went to this place:

Where I saw that guy:

Not taking note how much (at least from the right angle) it looks like this place:

3 Likes

AFAIR Ron stated somewhere that Mark hadn’t used this as an inspiration. :slight_smile:

It’s because you didn’t go there by night:


(otherwise you would have recognised the rodents)

2 Likes

It should be nice to gather all these parallel images in a permament thread. There are several of this kind, scattered here and there.

What I remember him saying is that he usually sees pictures that are altered in a way so they clook more similiar to each other than they actually are. I agree that it is a heavy stretch since almost none of the details match.

It was a concert so of course it was dark when I left. :slight_smile:

Don’t want to open a new topic just for this, but if the Digital Antiquarian is covering Fate of Atlantis that’s definitely of interest. (Even more so after having to sit through months of posts about the history of Windows). So without further ado:

https://www.filfre.net/2018/09/indiana-jones-and-the-fate-of-atlantis-or-of-movies-and-games-and-whether-the-twain-shall-meet/

1 Like

“Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, the rather less satisfying second SCUMM game.”

That’s blasphemy!

2 Likes

It’s an opinion. A wrong one from my perspective, but right on the nail for somebody else.

2 Likes

I thought Zak was more satisfying, even though Maniac Mansion felt more like you were in a living world.

But above all, even though they are pre-Monkey Island there aren’t that many 30-year-old games that hold up that well.

2 Likes

Shower thought:

One could run all the Indy voice lines from the talkie version of the game through an AI, to make them sound like Harrison Ford. For an ultimate voice & sound mod of the game.

Then also upgrade the music files with AI, to sound like a real orchestral film sound track. (Sometimes when I play Last Crusade, I put on the movie soundtrack while playing).

The pixel graphics can stay just as they are, because they already look perfect. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Great idea! :smiley:

Unfortunately most AI systems aren’t allowed to produce voices that sound like a famous person…

That doesn’t seem to stop all those people on Youtube making weird AI “covers” of songs like this:

:slight_smile:

Even if regular AI services don’t allow it, it should be possible to do for someone with even a little knowledge about these things. But probably a lot of work, and the voice would have to be extracted from the game files.

2 Likes

Someone added an AI version of Gary Owens to Space Quest 5 (both SQ4 and SQ6 had him, but not SQ5) -

He did it using Tortoise-TTS which you run locally (i.e on your own computer’s GPU), he explained his pipeline on the page for the SQ5 vocal mod…

If you want to try adding voices to other old games, here is my general pipeline.

  • Programming: Decompile and understand a game’s code to figure out what and where changes are needed to get both text and speech working.
  • Dataset Collection: Quality > Quantity. Think about a character and what voice would be appropriate and try to find or make a dataset that matches the character. Consider the trade-offs of using audio denoising on low quality audio.
  • Fine-Tuning: Fine-tune voice models using Tortoise-TTS and RVC. If you want, you can also experiment with fine-tuning F5-TTS and E2-TTS. You can find some scattered tutorials here.
  • Text Extraction: Extract text from a game and sort it by speaker if needed.
  • Synthetic Voice Generation: Tortoise-TTS can take hours to generate hundreds of vocal lines on a GPU. Additionally, you may try generating multiple samples at once, as the quality and delivery may vary with random seed.
  • Quality Control: Filter out bad audio samples and select the best ones. If a vocal line isn’t working try generating more, correcting any issues with the text or rewriting it more phonetically. For example, rewriting “EVA” as “E.V.A.” or “II” as “Two”.
2 Likes

For the voice, they should get Troy Baker. Even Harrison Ford himself acknowledged he did a better job sounding like Indy than he could in The Great Circle (which is, aptly, really great)
For the music, no need to use AI when you have

Or better yet: (except somehow the Raiders theme sounds like it is done by an early 90s computer not quite capable of getting the trumpet right - but that is an easy fix as that one has been recorded by real orchestras thousands of times)

(Click on the playlist or description to listen to all 42 tracks)

2 Likes

The Orchestral Soundtrack Re-Recording sounds great! But that would probably not work with the iMuse system, would it?

Probably not, because the timing would be off. Although Curse of Monkey Island also uses real audio within iMuse, the re-recorded orchestral version is a) not complete b) obviously recorded live which causes timing to be off.
You would split the instrument parts and place new time hooks by hand.

The second version, which actually sounds better to me * (if you listen beyond the first two minutes of horrible opening tune, that is) seems to be complete and already split into multiple tracks. IIRC, I think this is a re-orchestration using the original MIDI tracks but with modern quality samples for the instruments which should allow for an “easier” integration with iMuse. Of course you’d need the individual instrument soundbanks or do some tricks to get the effect of the instruments joining in or dropping off like in the Voodoo swamp in Monkey Island 2. Not sure if any game after that used iMUSE to that extent, they probably just stuck to transitioning from one track to another and looping in varying ways.

Sounds like a fun mod project either way…

*: in the first version the trumpets and trombones are flat

3 Likes