Black Mesa Announcement System

For other uses, see Black Mesa (disambiguation).

Black Mesa Announcement System
General information
Alternate names	Base Computer Vox
Faction	Black Mesa
Type	Public address system
Entity	speaker ambient_generic

 

"Attention. Black Mesa Announcement System now under military command."

― Black Mesa Announcement System

The Black Mesa Announcement System, also referred to as Vox ("Voice" in Latin) and Base Computer in the game files, is the public address system used throughout the Black Mesa Research Facility, relaying audible messages and announcements across the facility through unseen intercoms, most of the time starting with notification sounds. Often it is operated by actual people, depending on the needs of the personnel, and can act on its own as a basic A.I. Additionally, a similar but automatic announcement system is mounted on the Black Mesa Transit System trams.

Behind the scenes

The announcements this system relays include area-specific announcements and door-related messages. There are two types of area-specific announcements: the first is announcements chosen randomly every few minutes and the second is messages that play when something specific happens, like when a button is pressed while something related to it is deactivated. The majority of those created for Half-Life do not actually play in-game; they can still be found in the file sentences.txt located in the game's sound folder. The only area-related announcements used are those for Sector C's Anomalous Materials Laboratory, Sector D's High Security Materials Storage Area, Sector F's Lambda Reactor Coolant System, and a single message for Sector E's Track Control that plays if the tram is approached while power is off. Cut announcements also include general hazard warnings, turret activity warnings, and countdowns.

The system's robotic voice was achieved through a vocoder, not an actual voice actor. Foreign language versions of Half-Life use fully recorded sentences instead of combined words. In French and German, the announcements appear to be spoken by an actual human being with a filter effect, while the Italian, Spanish, Chinese (both traditional and simplified) and Korean versions use a robotic voice similar to the English release. In French, the door-related messages are delivered by a female voice while the rest are by a male voice.

While referred to several times as the "Black Mesa Announcement System", it was originally known as "Automatic Diagnostic and Announcement System", as heard in an unused sound file, vox_login.wav. An older version of the system, with a more robotic voice, can be found in the unofficial desktop theme for Half-Life. The sound files were provided by Valve.

The Black Mesa Announcement System is the informal predecessor to the Breencast and Overwatch Voice introduced in Half-Life 2 and the Aperture Science Announcement System introduced in Portal.

References

Combine OverWiki has a list of quotes for Black Mesa Announcement System.