Introduction

Firstly, thank you for your interest in recording voice lines to be used in Combat Mission going forward. Improving the representation of diverse people is of critical importance to improving the culture in defence, government and our country.

This guide will walk you through the steps to create useful voice lines for insertion into the game.

Important Points

If possible please follow the guide for using Audacity to record as it makes it easier on our end to implement the files in the game (as we don’t have to change the files into a different format). If you can’t for whatever reason, please feel free to do whatever it takes to get us a recording, just having them is the most important thing. You can download Audacity onto personal devices as well if that makes it easier

o If you can’t (or don’t want to) use Audacity, skip straight to Stage 4 and follow all the steps for naming the file correctly through to putting it in the correct folder

Don’t worry if you aren’t a professional voice artist, just try your best. It’s more important to us to get the voice lines in than worrying about whether we’re going to win a BAFTA

o You may find the British army mnemonic for giving orders useful: CLAP; Clearly, Loudly, As an order, with Pauses

Try to record in a non-echoing location if possible. Rooms with lots of (soft) furniture and carpets are best. If you can’t find a suitable location don’t worry about it, again it’s more important that we get the lines in any form

Please record three takes of each line, all within the same file. This allows us to select the best take and cut out the others

Please make sure to record each different line in a separate file Please make sure the file is named correctly as described in the documentation Feel free to have family members or friends record lines as well. We’re looking for as many

voices as possible to get a good range and hopefully a selection for each line

What is Combat Mission?

Firstly, some context for why we’re doing this will hopefully help you to understand why you’re here.

Combat Mission is a Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) wargame developed by Battlefront.com that Dstl licenses from the publishers Slitherine/Matrix games. We have a professional version in Dstl which we use for rapid, cost-effective tactical land wargaming.

It’s almost entirely focused on the land domain, primarily looking at combined-arms close-combat with broad representations of enablers such as air and artillery. It’s completely 3D, easy to use and great for visualisation.

Currently Combat Mission represents the British Army as exclusively white men, and is voiced to reflect that. Having spoken with the developers and publishers, they have agreed they need to improve this representation and are willing to do so for free with a little help from us. Whilst they work on implementing new graphics to represent non-male and BAME people, we have the exciting task of recording voice lines to reflect these new representations.

We really appreciate your help with recording these lines. CM is very customer-facing and likely to be seen and interacted with directly by members of the military and seniors. Having strong representations of diverse peoples within the game will help to improve the culture inside the

military and Dstl. What we’re seeking to do is normalise the fact that the British Army is not exclusively staffed by straight, white men, but is in fact a diverse melting pot of people.

If you are concerned, I can assure you that it will not be possible for anyone to know that your voice is in the game (unless they can recognise your voice of course). If you’re comfortable, feel free to send me your name and I will happily credit you when this work is released.

With that, let’s get started!

These arrows indicate an action you need to take.

Step 1 – Install Audacity

Download and install the latest version of Audacity onto your machine.

Audacity is a simple, free piece of software which will allow you to record your voice in the correct format for us to use.

Step 2 – Find a voice line you want to record

This document includes most of the voice lines it is possible to record for use in CM.

The opening page gives some guidance on what to record and how to record a line.

There are hundreds of voice lines to choose from so I would encourage picking a selection that sound fun to you. Some of them will be “easier” to record from an acting perspective, for example ones where you don’t need to pretend you’ve been shot.

Try and “act” to the best of your ability. It might be a little embarrassing but it will make the end product so much better if you can put some emotion into what you’re saying. If you aren’t comfortable pretending to be in the middle of a fire-fight then that’s perfectly alright of course, but I would probably recommend selecting some of the less action-oriented lines to try out.

I would encourage everyone to have a go at recording some lines for the “Off board artillery calls” found near the bottom of the “Troops” tab.

These will be the lines which are heard the most during gaming because they play over the top of everything else. Other lines will only be heard if the camera is close to the person actually saying the line.

As a general point, a lot of lines use the pronouns him/he. Absolutely feel free to change the pronouns to anything else you would like to say. It is worth keeping in mind that the adversaries Britain is likely to face will not use large numbers of non-male soldiers in frontline combat, however it’s more important that you give a line that you are comfortable with and which you would say in that situation. If you would say “Got her!” or “Got them!” (or anything else), rather than him, that’s absolutely fine.

Let’s assume for now we’re going to record the line “Hello, fire mission, out”.

Step 3 – Record the voice line

Firstly, open up Audacity. You should get a screen which looks like this.

We need to make sure the Project Rate in the bottom left is set to the correct value.

Make sure the Project Rate is set to 44100 Hz.

Then we need to make sure that our Headset microphone is set as the recording device.

Click on the drop down menu and select the correct device:

If you’re using a different device to record, select that one. It may be worth testing different devices to see which sounds the best.

It can be useful to set your output device to whichever output you want as well (probably headset):

We also only want to record in 1 (Mono) Channel.

Click on the drop down box next to the microphone input and select 1 (Mono) Recording Channel.

Recording the line itself couldn’t be easier. Just hit the big red record button at the top.

Important: Leave a second or two at the start of the line and between every take so that it’s easier to edit around.

We’re going to conduct three takes of the line to make it more likely to get a good quality one. Make sure you know the line, or that you have it open somewhere that you can read it.

When you hit record, you’ll see the top level of the screen start to fill in. When you speak, you’ll see peaks start to appear which lets you know it’s working.

When you want to stop recording, just hit the square stop button to the left. Remember to leave a few seconds of empty space at the end.

Remember the CLAP mnemonic – Clearly, Loudly, As an order, with Pauses

Go ahead and give it a first attempt now:

When you’re finished, it should look something like this:

Don’t worry if it’s a bit quiet, we can sort that out on our end. What’s most important is that you can clearly hear what you’re saying.

If you aren’t happy with the attempt, just hit the little cross in the top left of the track and try again:

Step 4 – Save the voice line

When you’re happy with the line, the next step is to save it into the appropriate area and in the correct format.

Firstly, go to File > Export > Export as WAV in the top left:

The easiest way to do this will be to save into your personal area first and then transfer the files into the shared area afterwards.

As such, just saving them into the default “Music” folder will suffice for now:

The naming convention is quite important for us to determine what voice lines have been recorded, and to ensure that the game interprets them correctly. The format is:

Nationality (British) | whatever descriptor words are in parentheses | file identifier (we’ll use A, B, C etc.)

So in this instance the first part of our save name will be “British”:

We can then check the spreadsheet for what the descriptor is:

Important: Sometimes the descriptors are in the group heading instead, like here:

So the next part of the save will be “fire mission request received out”:

Finally we need an identifier, so we’ll just put the letter “A”:

If you wanted to provide multiple versions of the same line (different accents for example), you would name the second version B and the third C etc.

Having named it correctly, change the type to 32-bit float PCM:

Hit save, and then hit “OK” on the next window without changing any settings.

If you navigate to the folder you installed it in (“Music” in this case), you should see the file there.

Play it to check it survived the process.

Follow the steps in the PAXsims post for where to send your files when they’re completed.

What happens next?

Next I’ll apply some audio effects to try and make it sound more “war-y” (the technical term). After that I’ll combine all of the audio lines together and put them into the game. A follow-up video will come out showcasing the features we’ve implemented, and hopefully at some point in the future you’ll hear yourself in the game!

What about Helicopters and Aircraft?

There are some voice lines available for pilots but they aren’t in the spreadsheet. If you would like to record some lines for a particular situation then let me know (contact details above) and I’ll find the details for you.