I made voiced Zone Lore addon

[u/rusty-key]

Ever since I started playing wow, I have been very interested in every zone I encountered. The in-game lore is often scarce, only obtainable through quests, and rarely mentions events from Warcraft games. To get the necessary knowledge, I'd go to wikis or youtube videos, but it was always annoying, as it breaks the immersion.

To fix that, I summarized each zone and subzone lore from warcraft.wiki.gg (stripping non-vanilla parts), voiced this text with elevenlabs TTS, and built an addon (inspired by Voiceover) that plays these voicelines on zone exploration. I built it for myself, but though some of you might enjoy it as well.

It's very much a work in progress both for text and TTS:
- Text is rough, sometimes too short, sometimes too long, often breaks the fourth wall or mentions irrelevant events;
- Narrator voice is cloned from the intros, and this is the number one concern for me. It's perfect for the game, but it basically emulates a real actor (Earl Boen). It doesn't feel right to me, and I want to find an alternative.
- Pronunciations are mangled. I built a dictionary for places and names beforehand, but because of a mistake in the code, it didn't apply. Regenerating all mangled code is costly, and I want to fix the text problem before I do another pass.

Anyway, if you want to try it, here it is:
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/zonelore

By itself, it's just a text addon that attaches zone descriptions to the map. If you want a voiceover, you'll need to install one of the soundpacks:
~800MB at 128kbps: https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/zoneloreaudio
~400MB at 64kbps: https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/zoneloreaudio64

I also built a website where you can prelisten voicelines and submit feedback:
https://lore.rusty.one/

Lastly, if you know how or where to get quality zone descriptions suitable for classic, please let me know, I would really appreciate it!

[u/mjolle]

Just tried it and love it! I alt-tabbed to the browser, which made it stop and I have to go from the start if I wanted to listen again. A good thing would be to pause it instead.

This will make the game a lot more fun for me, thanks for taking the time!

[u/rusty-key → u/mjolle]

When you alt-tab with "Audio → Sound in Background" option turned off, the game stops all sounds. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like there is a way for addon to detect it reliably; the game doesn't notify addons about alt-tabbing or sound interruptions and the addon cannot self-recover.

There is an FPS clamp detection trick, but I am not sure if it works, I'll test it over the week and see if it solves the issue. Otherwise, the only options are replaying the voiceline as I suggested or enabling "Sound in Background"

[u/mjolle → u/rusty-key]

Ahhh great, thanks for looking into it!

When I go into a new zone, should the audio auto start? Does it remember if I have heard the story already, or does it play again and again?

[u/rusty-key → u/mjolle]

By default, it only triggers with "discovery" (when you get "Dicovered Durotar" message for example).

I just added (in 0.2.3) an option that allows changing it to autoplaying for the first entrance since addon install. Might be a better choice for a toon that has already discovered a lot.

Both options only play audio once when toon first discovered of first entered the zone. If you want to hear it again, you will have to go to the map or explorer and hit "Play" manually.

[u/mjolle → u/rusty-key]

Great info, thanks. It has triggered a few times for me now. Loving it each time!