Chaurus Communication
Entry posted by Seijin8
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The next chapter in the quest to make some chaurus make sense somewhat will be with their dialogue and sounds.
Bethesda gave the following sounds for chaurus (all can be found in the Sounds BSA under (Sound\FX\NPC\charus):
- Breathing (which just sounds like minor chitters, and I don't think it sounds like breathing of any kind. Maybe it is some internal process, but not likely breathing.
- Taunt (a series of swooshes and click-clacks)
- Warning Call 01 (as Taunt but with an actual screeching vocalization!)
- Warning Tail 01 (as Taunt with some smacking sounds)
- Mandibles (3 sounds, all similar clacking)
- Injured (2 sounds that are I guess like breaking chitin)
- Foot (used for footstep sounds)
- Feed (2 sound sets like a wetter version of mandibles)
- Death (2 sets with a louder injured sound and a trailing chitter)
- Attack (1 sound which might be a claw attack or bite)
Of all these, only Warning Call 01 has actual vocalization; everything else is the sound of "chitin on chitin" or "chitin on stone" or "chitin getting smacked" or "chitin smacking something".
The extracted vocalization sounds like this:
Chaurus Warning vocalization.wav
... and even that has some residual clacking chitin sounds.
The only parallels I've found for the vocalizations are either the higher-pitched sounds made by xenomorphs (because we needed far more evidence that chaurus are half-stolen xenomorphs with far less backstory), and some raptor-esque bird/dinosaur calls (though not at all like Jurassic Park's velociraptor "honks").
So, I've been toying with that one vocalization, cleaned it up a bit and tweaked parts of it to get a small array like this:
I will keep tweaking these, but figured I'd start by expanding their sex vocabulary and splitting their sounds by stage and intensity.
A lead up to egg release might sound like:
And then some sounds surrounding the event. I don't want the audio to get too cluttered though, so if it drowns out the voice or egglaying effects, it is no good. Unfortunately, I only have stereo to work with, and steroscopic sounds don't work with Sexlab scenes. For instance: if I make left channel the female voice and right channel the chaurus and egglaying, it "sounds correct" only if the camera POV has the woman's head on the left and backside on the right. I would like to see if there is a way to drop markers for sound release that are mapped more geometrically to the scene, to make the sounds move with camera perspective, but right now I don't know how that would work and it would be very script intensive, maybe prohibitively so.
Aside from the sex sounds, I need to find consistent vocalizations for a wide array for events, ranging from combat (detection, attack, alert, target lost, searching), to general activities (finding resources, finding something curious, hungry, nervous), to more complex behavioral states (diseased, in distress, lamenting a fallen breeder, etc).
Obviously these should have enough difference to make their meaning clear, but how meaning is derived may not be obvious (speed of clicks, number of clicks, or other barely noticeable bits may be the real information carriers, less so with pitch. It makes the most sense to me that they transmit through the rock around them, and the pitch is less significant than specific "beats" or other percussive elements.
While there is a lot of discussion about pheremones being a significant element to their communication, this makes any interaction difficult for the player character. I can create a visual overlay for the scent trails (similar to the clairvoyance power), but the PC would generally lack the ability to transmit these. Alchemy might allow them to do so, but then you run in to Skyrim's #1 anti-immersion UI issue: needing to open a menu to do anything. I'd prefer to avoid that, maybe even creating an integrated control set for such communications, where an interaction key is pressed, and a variety of other more analog actions create the specific effect, such as the mouse scroll wheel or other key presses or movements. Maybe the player would even need to be in specific environments to transmit correctly, such as needing to be near running water or standing on a mining deposit to make certain "calls".
I am open to discussion on any of this. The interaction layer for Chaurus Life needs to have the communication elements built into it, so progress on the mod requires me to tackle this sooner rather than later.
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