Hey peeps,
There's a lot of really cool ideas being bounced here and we're taking note of every good idea which is being suggested. Keep them coming!
Just so you know, there are a lot of factors to take into account regarding the script for F1.
The first factor is concern regarding repetition. Those who have played GRID will understand that whilst playing the game, the pit chief became annoying saying the same sentences alot. This was using a game script which was over 3000 lines in size (for just the English). Game mechanics will dictate that certain phrases will naturally be said more than others. If we record 20-40 lines with each driver engineer (which would equate to 400 to 800 lines just for the driver engineer) you can imagine the horrible repitition you'd end up hearing.
For DiRT2, the English script has more than tripled to over 9000 lines. Then, remember that we want to translate to FIGSJ (French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese). That's now over 45000 lines of speech to record, process and ship on a disk. If each line is 3 seconds long, that's 37.5 hours of speech!
So, for a comfortable unrepetative script, with variation per line, just for the race engineer, you're probably looking at a good 500 lines per race engineer. Multiply that by the number of race engineers, 20, you're looking at 10,000 lines before you look at the translations. And that's for just the race engineer.
Next, just because Codemasters have the license to create an official Formula One racing video game, this does not automatically give us any more than the permission to create that game with access to data to re-create an accurate representation of the sport. What I mean is, we don't suddenly have free access to the race engineers to get them into a studio to record a script we have re-created - and believe me, these guys are really busy. Anything more than access to the data will come from the results of the hard work the Codemasters production team are putting in to build personal relationships with each and every team. They owe us nothing, we have to work to get them to give us what we need, and anything we get is greatfully recieved.
I hope that helps you understand the process that we will go through to create a good script that not only works with our English territories, but the foriegn language territories which are very important to us.
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