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.

[Hooman]

Reading the first post I found myself thinking Leeor is not going to be a fan of AI generated content. Not too surprised by his response.

For code changes, I would be uncomfortable with vibe coded submission. I have a very strong preference for small change sets that are easy to understand and review. That tends to exclude a lot of vibe coded output. A lot of AI generated code can be overly verbose, sometimes unnecessarily complicated, and of highly variable quality. Combine that with how quickly AI tools can produce a large quantity of code, and it creates a situation where proper review can become very difficult. I'm generally of the opinion that code submissions should be well understood by the person submitting them, and should be readily understood by a reviewer. Mostly I want conditions where review is easy and quality can be maintained.

To be clear, my objection here isn't really about using AI tools for a research and learning phase, or a prototype phase. My concerns are more about quality and understandability when it comes time to present and review code.

There was someone who vibe coded some prototype UI upgrades. I would say that effort was appreciated. People did go over the visual changes to comment on them, and note which changes would be good improvements to make.

Those vibe coded UI upgrades were never formally submitted for inclusion. The person who made the UI changes left a link to his fork for anyone curious, though there was never a detailed review, nor was a PR opened for the changes. The focus was more on the general ideas for UI updates being presented, rather than on the code.

Given your stated background, I'm guessing you'd be more interested in code submissions. We do certainly like quality code submissions, and are generally happy to work with people that want to give it a try, or learn something new.