Voice Actors for Games Deserve Royalties Too?

While purusing through Slashdot today (groaning at all the anti-MS, pro-linux propoganda like I normally do) I came across an interesting article that they linked from the NY Times.

The basic jist of the article is that the primary voice actor for GTA 4 (Michael Hollick) is worried that his union isn't fighting for his rights enough to get residuals/royalties on work that voice actors do for games. For the record he was simply paid $100,000 for his time in the voice studio.

Now I am not writing this to debate whether or not he should get royalties, personally I think he should since he did contribute to the product. My primary conern is just how much should a voice actor get when their contribution is fairly insignificant in comparison to the work a programmer, artist, designer/producer, QA, etc. does actually making the game. Remember that GTA 4 was probably about 2 years worth of team each and probably a few hundred man-years worth of work in total.

While I am unsure what rates these developers of GTA 4 are getting for royalties (and certainly hope they are getting some at all), I certainly do believe that the they should get a much significantly higher rate than a voice actor. After all it is their constant hard work that actually makes the game so great. Sure voice acting is cool and it helps augment the personalities that the developers have given the assets in the world, but the game would still be great even if players had to conversations that the characters have as text on the screen.

Why DTS/DSQ Importing Doesn't Work

It seems like every 6 months there is a raging debate that starts whether or not its acceptable for a 3D application to allow for the importing of the Torque model formats DTS and DSQ. Personally I am not cool with this because 99% of the time it is used by some piss ass company that is looking to rip off someone elses art, call it their own and put the effort in to profit off of it. I know that is rather extreme but I have seen it myself with art that I did for Lore being ripped off and used in someone elses product, so it is happening.

But this isn't the topic of this blog post, instead I want to remind people why importing DTS and DSQ files doesn't work from a functional standpoint. Here's why:

1. Data woes. Think of translating your favorite book through babblefish from English to Chinese and then back to English. While the story that you know and love is still there, a lot has been lost in translation, in essense ruining the very material that you once cherished. This is no different for translating 3D model data around, regardless if you are talking about DTS/DSQ or intermediary formats that people use like OBJ, 3DS or even FBX. Data gets lost and/or converted along the way. It happens when you export your original 3D source scene to DTS/DSQ and it happens when you foolishly import the data back in.

2. Not all data is put into a DTS/DSQ. Anyone who has worked with Torque from an art standpoint will tell you that there is more to making DTS/DSQ files than what is encoded in the files. There are helpers and other bits of scene data that are not exported but influence the files, there are CFG files that heavily influence data exporting which are not included, and so on and so forth. Sure 90% of the data is there, but do you really want to just work with a portion of the file?

3. Don't break the chain. Any artist worth thier weight to be involved in a games project will tell you that maintaining a consistent tool chain is very important as it allows the artist to track changes and maintain the art. My particular tool chain is usually just: 3DS Max -> temp DTS -> UnmessDTS -> Game. I maintain a particular sense of control of the 3D art that I do via incrimental file saves, allowing me to track my changes and revert back if I have done something stupid. Where DTS/DSQ importing breaks the chain is that it introduces an area where someone can simply make a quick edit to the file that down the line breaks the art. It isn't hard for example to break compatability with the default set of torque DSQs. Nor is it hard for someone to make an edit to an imported DTS/DSQ, and then have that edit overwritten by the artist who has no idea the change happend (sure you could track said change, but now you would have to export from your 3D app, load the imported file, make the changes, export again, GAH!). Simply put don't use or introduce something that messes up the chain, art only moves forward in the chain, there is no cyclical cycle where you can push data back.


These 3 points are the most compelling reasons why you should not use DTS/DSQ importing, this isn't BS, this is information coming from someone who has worked with this format for well over 7 years now. DTS/DSQ importing is not a magic bullet that will fix your art woes with a problem DTS/DSQ file, nor will it allow for quick and simple editing or even be a valid solution to learn how to do DTS/DSQ exporting yourself (use Showtool Pro if you honestly want to look at the data in the file). There's your morning coffee, served to you straight up and as honest as it is going to come.