Introducing myself.

[larrydgraysdz]

I'm a developer that has been working with coding since mid 1980's. I have both Outpost and Outpost II on DVD somewhere in storage. I spent many hours late 90's and early 2000 playing these.  I found this turn based game and installed it. I like it and want to help out. So, I know C, I know Java extremely well and I know Claude Code fairly well. I think I can help. I love the turn-based genre games too. I've cloned the code, compiled it and run it. I have started a fork repo at github.com/larrydgray

My first thought when playing it was, "sound!"

Sourcing space-ambient music without licensing headaches

OpenGameArt.org ? filter by "Ambient"/"Space", most tracks are CC0 or CC-BY, made specifically for games like this.
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) ? huge catalog, CC-BY (just needs attribution in your credits, which this repo already has a spot for).
Sonniss GDC bundles (sonniss.com/gameaudiogdc) ? free, no-attribution-needed SFX/music packs released for GDC each year, heavily used in indie/fan games.
freesound.org ? best for one-shot SFX (mining, construction, alerts) rather than full ambient tracks; check each file's specific CC license (varies per upload).

I am thinking Mars maybe fading in and out. Maybe timed with certain events or just randomly sometimes. But adding a few others that theme well.

And definitely female AI voice. Kokoro-82M is what Claude recommended. Why it fits best here: both the engine and all 54 voice presets are Apache-2.0 licensed ? one license covers everything, so there's no per-voice license auditing needed before you commit generated files into a BSD-3 repo. It's tiny (82M params, runs fine on CPU, no GPU needed) and currently rates highest quality (MOS 4.2) among lightweight local TTS models, with several American/British female presets (af_heart, af_bella, bf_emma, etc.) that would suit a game advisor/CMO voice.

And some beginning prioritized UI sound effects and event sound effects.

Let me know your thoughts. thanks.

[leeor_net]

Hello and welcome!

Thanks for your interest! As a note, I really hate generative AI and refuse to allow it to touch any of the code and for sure will not allow any art assets (including sounds/music) into the project.

That stated, I've looked around on OpenGameArt.com for awhile and have some tracks other than Mars that I want to include in the game (the planet select screen is an example). I haven't added them yet as it's been a low priority and I wanted to avoid increasing the download size until it's closer to ready for real play time.

For the AI voices, I was planning on hiring local students to record voice lines for the AI using a recording studio available at the local community liberal arts college. It's a moderate fee, something I can afford but I don't have the script yet since the game isn't really finished. When I have a good idea of what lines the AI voices should be saying I'll be having real people voicing the AI lines. Side note -- in the beginning of the project circa 2016 I had some computer generated ai voices and they really sucked so I removed them because they weren't helpful and the rate of change was so high that I opted to wait until I had a better idea of what was actually needed for voice lines.