Tuesday 25 April 2006

Pic of the day: Glowing with true magic! Or a technology so advanced, it is indistinguishable from magic.

Oblivion: Magic words

Just when you think you've seen it all...

Oblivion is a really impressive game: The graphics are outstanding and there is a lot of content. The game is just massive! But the user interface could use some improvement. Compared to for instance "City of Heroes", it is both less intuitive and less flexible. There are several important keys that cannot be moved. And the mouse buttons are only used for combat, one for attacking and one for blocking, whereas you use spacebar to activate things and talk to people. The one reason why I don't constantly attack shopkeepers and civilians in the game may be a that I use a game controller, where activate and attack are assigned to different buttons. (It probably also helps that I have played the Elder Scrolls games regularly for a decade or more...) In further confusion, you do of course use the mouse in the menus. Since there is a lot of everything, the menus tend to consist of very long lists for you to scroll through. And that brings us to the topic of the day.

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One of the nifty things with this game is that you can make modifications to it. And even better, those modifications can be uploaded to the Internet for others to share. I was going through a list of such "mods" when I saw one titled "magic words". This looked intriguing! Perhaps it would be possible to make shortcuts accessible by just typing the magic words? But even my imagination did not prepare me for what followed. You don't type the magic words; you say them. The modification integrates with a free program that uses Microsoft speech recognition SDK, which is also freely available on the Net. The creator of the mod and then made a database of all the magic spells in the game, which are quite a lot. Each of them can now be activated in game by simply speaking the name of the spell! You can choose between two modes: To just ready the spell when you speak its name, or to cast it when you speak the name. I strongly recommend to just ready it. Speech recognition is not that reliable, as you may have noticed from the entries I have dictated. Sending the text into the game is no trivial matter either; I had to tweak it because even my new computer was not fast enough to get all the keystrokes until I slowed down the text transfer. Even then, it may fail now and then, especially if there is a lot going on such as in the middle of a battle. And that, of course, is where you really don't want a spell to fail!

Playing Oblivion becomes a whole new experience with this modification. It is just a lot more immersive. I guess this could depend on the character you are playing, that could be situations where you would want to stop and consult your spell book. But my character normally uses a few small spells over and over, so it makes perfect sense for me to just speak the spells. It is like, you know, being there! "Summon flame atronach! Shield! FIREBALL!"

If you don't see the awesome awesomeness of this, I guess you just have to try it. The next step up from this would be to be able to put on a glove that lets me point directly at things on the screen instead of mousing around. I feel pretty sure that if I live long enough, we will have that too. But for now, this is the best a man can get.

(And again, like when I first got speech recognition software, I start to wonder why I can't speak to my household appliances and have them understand me. I am sure that will happen too, if we live long enough.)

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I planned to include a link to where I found this mod, but it was not where I remembered it. Perhaps it has already moved? In any case, I recommend you google for it using the terms oblivion and "magic words". The author's name is Tevenan.