I use a set of voice controls for playing Elite. I can manage without (though for lack of use I do, once in a while forget which button does some obscure task). It’s a convenience. Why I actually have to justify this shit is beyond me, but some people get really upset about anyone using any kind of driver aid. FDev have released a new ship’s autopilot thing in the latest update and people are all salty about that too. Anyway, I use this voice control thing, using a paid for set of profiles for the Voice Attack software.

The voice packs are from a company called HCS and they often feature famous actors from sci-fi and other things. Thus I can nerd out by having Tom Baker, or Bill Shatner or various others (actually Brian Blessed is a personal favourite) being the voice of my ship’s computer. Oh yes. I’ll even take the nasally sarcasm of Eli (played by John de Lancie) telling me what a waste of humanity I am for the complete geek value. Also it makes flying the ship a bit easier (and I’m lazy).

Now, once in a while, often coinciding with a big update in the game (as has just happened) a new release of the voice pack profiles is made to allow for the changes to the game. That happened today. I downloaded it, and asked it to restore my settings from the previous release.

At this point it shat itself and I rolled my eyes. Originally HCS were all about the fact they recorded the famous actors and you were really paying for that. The voice attack profiles that made it run were a bit rough and ready, given out “as is” and you could tweak them. These days, they’ve made the profile into a closed source plugin and it’s increasingly difficult to get under the bonnet. That’s fine, but if you’re going to release it as a piece of polished software, then please can it fucking work. It seems like every time they do this, I’m left scratching my head wondering how to fix the thing that didn’t quite work in the upgrade procedure. This time it was the voice triggers. It *should* have done a nice conversion from the old format to the new. Instead it (as it turned out) inserted a ton of new lines, without removing the now superfluous old ones.

Well, by the time I had actually worked out what was going on, whilst moaning at tech support, one of the devs had arrived on the discord channel and fixed up my voice triggers. I am pretty sure I had already sorted it, but was happy to let him check it over and make sure it was now correct. The thing of it is, how can I have been the only one, the dev even thanked me for helping him find the problem. Did they not QA someone wanting to transfer custom voice triggers from one version to the next? Wasted a ton of time when I could have been flying my space ship about. Well, hopefully there won’t be another update in a while and just maybe, next time it will “just work”, but I hold out little hope.