Random Announcer System [PORT]

[Monotheonist]

About the PR

Lord Deltanedas is gonna scream at me for this one because FUCK!! IT IS A MESS!!

This PR is for the Random Announcer System that EE has, originally from Parkstation. It is picked from Impstation who has fixed it up, so therefore a good amount of things are labeled as being from that.
To demonstrate this functionality, N.E.I.L. (Neil Breen, the ancient pre-rebase announcer voice) has been added back.
This touches a lot of upstream files and may be hell to maintain. It makes announcements a boolean, and makes using yaml to create announcers + add them to events maybe even a little easier.
I'm planning on adding announcers from Impstation (Sinister, Vox Mesa,) and other ones that eventually may crop up (The obama one that Lyndo keeps shitposting to me about, and Miku / Kasane Teto are some ideas that can be floated) in seperate sequential PRs, for ease of access if anyone would like to revert them.

Why / Balance

I have been a proponent of this for a long time; it adds more flexibility and customization to the server, and selects the voice that all the announcements are in at roundstart. It's cool, and more announcers = more fun, to me. There's little balance reason to it, it's just cool to have.

Technical details

Touches a load of C#, audio, events yaml, if there's an announcement, you name it, it touches it. Like, okay. In order of the tag labels:

• Adds a shit ton of audio / reorganizes it. Leaves all the normal announcement stuff from upstream relatively intact, to my knowledge.
• C# for the actual systems for the announcements, and also to inject announcements about various station events into existing events. All that stuff.
• Locale for the announcement strings.
• Settings XAML (so, UI code) to change the volume of the announcer in case nobody wants to hear them ;-;
• YAML for the probabilities and such of what announcers will play.

Media

TODO; coming soon when I have this PR finally finished and ready for direction review (we are not to that point yet.)

Requirements

• I have tested all added content and changes. (I am testing every couple commits.)
• I have added media to this PR or it does not require an ingame showcase.

Breaking changes

Review notes for the maintainers that look at this - this shit needs a bunch of comments. Point out where I should put them, please. I mean it because this is a frankly fucking massive PR.

Otherwise, here's the most notable breaking change: this is going to break nearly all upstream files with a string for the announcement being said for that event; there are examples of booleans in the files changed you can replace these with (implying you can even load that.)

Changelog

🆑 Monotheonist, Einstein Engines, Impstation

• add: Added functionality for multiple announcers. Now, you don't have to hear just one guy over the PA.
• add: Added Neil Breen back as an announcer.

[hivehum]

hello! thanks for porting a feature from imp! it's an honor!

couple notes on our announcers

• yeah the code is a mess lol. one of the first things we implemented in our fork. going to keep an eye on this PR and probably port any changes y'all do
• maintenance can be a pain, upstream breaks this all the time. startAnnouncement becomes a boolean so you have to check that for any event that is implemented. additionally if you havent its a good idea to do a pass on the locale strings to make sure everything's in order
• we have three unique announcers that you are also more than welcome to port! tiktok ( new tiktok announcer + alert levels fixed + intern new alert levels impstation/imp-station-14#132 ), sinister (An additional rare station announcer impstation/imp-station-14#388 ), and mesa vox ( Announcer using the Half-Life VOX system impstation/imp-station-14#798 ). sinister in particular is voiced by one of our devs, AftrLite, who is probably happy/free to voice additional lines for DV

[Monotheonist]

Reason the PR is open is that it works on my machine, and I'm able to test. It's still kinda broken. Here's some takeaways from playing with it for a little while;

• Michael (current announcer) and Neil (old announcer) seem to have all their respective lines. At some point when I get to it I'll probably consider a do-over of all the lines that Neil has if I can; I have no idea how the original person who made 'em even got them, and a cursory look seems to reveal it possibly having been AI from a Hugging Face thing that no longer works...? So if you wanna have a discussion about the ethics of AI voices, be my guest; I'll replace them in this PR with either Sinister or someone else.
• Sometimes it straight up won't select an announcer (Well, it actually does. It's Intern. I nuked him.)
• Both VoxFem and Medibot don't got much, so I'm gonna remove them from this PR and inject even more impstation (namely Sinister and the other two hivehum mentioned if possible,) and maybe make that Obama TTS announcer Lyndo keeps bothering me about.💀

I think I'll do that in future PRs, and not all at once, so that when you or if you need to revert this you can do it sequentially (announcer by announcer) instead of having to like excise the announcers added here from the repo

[Monotheonist]

Other than Build and Test throwing a fit about the xeno vent critters localization pointing to {$location}, and also the lack of sound attribution (yes I do know - it's coming,) this is basically ready for actual review now.