Messages

16

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Hal keeps asking me...

« on: March 26, 2009, 09:59:44 am »

He's referring to the interface which allows you to set up hal as a chatbot on AIM messenger. From the sounds of it, your using the correct version of hal. Are you perhaps using hal without having set a user? I once restarted my computer to find that when hal started up all the settings were blank and so it was running without a name or a user which did all kinds of weird things to the conversations.

17

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Mic won't work with Vista

« on: March 26, 2009, 09:55:54 am »

That really is an odd message to get if the mic is indeed setup and registering in the recording list. I'm not even sure how to replicate that on my computer as I've got three microphones and each of them has always just worked when plugging them in. If you could perhaps borrow a microphone off of a friend and try that one. Perhaps the microphone is damaged in some way. What type of microphone is it(ie. mic jack or USB, brand and model)?

18

Ultra Hal 7.0 / crazy idea

« on: March 26, 2009, 09:50:00 am »

Too bad hal can't use perl as an e-mailer script can be done in just a few lines with perl. In VBScript it's not much more code if I remember correctly, but I can't seem to find any of my code when I was using vbscript with my webserver.

19

Ultra Hal 7.0 / crazy idea

« on: March 25, 2009, 07:42:50 pm »

It's actually incredibly easy to generate an e-mail with vbscript, but would you really want another spam bot on the web?

20

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Trouble altering haptek avatar in hal

« on: March 25, 2009, 04:43:23 pm »

Yeah, I have the expansion. The commands work just fine outside of hal, and it was through the haptek player that I figured out the commands I wanted. Based on a hunch, I just decided to include the delperson command twice in a row, and it works. Based on the fact that loading a different hair causes both the original and the new hair to render at the same time, and the fact that I have to call delperson twice to delete the earrings, I'm thinking hal is loading two copies of the mesh for some reason.

EDIT: This double loading phenomenon would also explain why such a small mesh causes so much load on my Geforce 8800 GT. From what I can tell these meshes are all pretty high resolution and the haptek player renderer probably isn't all that efficient. The sooner the ogre based renderer is done the better. I'll have full body characters with relief mapping and self shadowing running without any real drain on my graphics card then.

21

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Trouble altering haptek avatar in hal

« on: March 25, 2009, 03:54:31 pm »

I've been trying to change the appearance of the Sandy haptek avatar but I can't seem to get any of my changes to stick. I'm using this plugin to load the changes:

Code: [Select]

Rem Type=Plugin
Rem Name=DawnAvatar
Rem Author=
Rem Host=All

'------------------------------------------------------------------
'This sub setups the plug-ins option panel in Hal's options dialog
'------------------------------------------------------------------

Sub OptionsPanel()
lblPlugin(0).Caption = ""
lblPlugin(0).Move 120, 10, 3300, 1000
lblPlugin(0).WordWrap = True
lblPlugin(0).Visible = True
End Sub

Rem PLUGIN: SCRIPT_LOAD
HalMenu.HalCommand "<HAPFILE>Dawn.hap</HAPFILE>"
from a file containing this:

Code: [Select]

delperson[figure= stars]
load [file= Characters/Dawn/eyelashes.htr]

I was originally loading a different hair mesh but I removed those commands because for some reason it was loading both the original hair and the new hair on top of each other and it seems to be ignoring the delperson command as currently the eyelashes mesh is loading correctly but those horrible earrings just won't go away! Is there perhaps a better way to make the changes I want, or is something wrong in my files that I'm not seeing?

22

Share Conversations, Experiences, Graphics / More Free Software I found

« on: March 25, 2009, 10:28:47 am »

Well, it's general agreement that the interface for Blender3D was designed by aliens for aliens, so the learning curve is pretty steep to figure out how to do anything really amazing. Regardless of the bizarre interface, blender has one of the best, if not the best, shader plugin systems which can allow you to chain up some pretty interesting effects node by node. It was a group of Blender artists messing about with the shader system who came up with the fast screenspace ambient occlusion method which formed the basis for the method used in all the latest video games (Don't worry if that doesn't mean anything to you). I've not used daz, but the list of programs I've used to create content for games I've worked on includes 3DS Max 6,7 and 8, Maya 5,6 and 7, Softimage XSI, Mudbox, Milkshape 3D, Rhinoceros 3D, and of course Blender3D. Most of the programs I listed are or were high-end industry standard programs at one time and yet there isn't a single feature I can think of that Blender3D doesn't have for free. Blender3D even has a hair creation system and I think a cloths system (available on their site or related sites as a plugin) both of which are similar to what 3DS Max uses. If your looking for something more simple, I've heard wings3D is pretty good though I wouldn't use it as I think it's all done through subdivision and I find edge loop modeling much more efficient for game meshes.

Blender3D used to be even more awkward to use, but for the last few years I've found that using The Gimp and Blender3D I can make anything from movie grade CGI to game models. If you do pre-rendered stuff though you will need a 3rd party renderer supported by Blender3D as the default raytracer has many issues with antialiasing, but I've seen images using the default raytracer were you can't tell so there are obviously tricks to get it to do things I don't know about.

23

Ultra Hal Assistant File Sharing Area / Question:Answer plugin???

« on: March 24, 2009, 08:32:46 pm »

onthecuttingedge2005:
Nice to hear that at least your having fun []
I don't particularly care for people who do work for their own fame and don't share, as that and copyrights are what has caused many technologies like TTS to stagnate over the years, but I do understand your reasons for not posting stuff on this forum where just anyone can grab it and pretend it's there own. If I had the time I would go through all my old perl chatbots and see if any of it's as good as I remember it. A few years back I coded a chatbot with a parser that could understand the grammar quite well and most of the time could guess if a word was a noun, verb, or pronoun based off of a very minimal list of the more common words. I was even beginning to write code for it to understand latin roots inside of words and use those to gather the meaning of the words and sentences, but unfortunately the parser took me so long to get working that I never actually finished the bot. Something like that would work quite well inside of hal I think as the roots could be stored in the database and retrieved much quicker then my rather messy text file parsing. For some reason english grammar and how it's made up of just about every other languages has always interested me, so I could easily spend years working on a grammar parser and never finish it to my satisfaction.

EDIT: I wish I had discovered hal much sooner as it's exactly the sort of thing I did time and time again with perl, only to a much grander scale.

24

Ultra Hal 7.0 / IRC hal chaos

« on: March 24, 2009, 07:44:23 pm »

I'm not really interested in my hal talking to itself. Some people regard that sort of behavior as a sign of insanity[] I was just wondering if it had every been done to any larger scale like everyone joining a channel at one time just to watch the madness that I'm sure would ensue.

25

Ultra Hal 7.0 / IRC hal chaos

« on: March 24, 2009, 07:22:36 pm »

Has anyone ever thought about using their hal on an IRC channel? I was just thinking that it would be interesting to get a bunch of hals onto an IRC channel talking to each other and see what sort of chaos comes out of it. I've seen code snippets somewhere around here demonstrating how to send messages to hal from another program using visual basic, and it probably wouldn't be that hard to feed messages from an IRC channel to your hal. Just random musings on my part as I don't know if anyone here uses IRC.

26

Ultra Hal 7.0 / My experience so far

« on: March 24, 2009, 07:15:20 pm »

That's a rather cruel and unusual thing to do to a poor, and defenseless bot. You should be ashamed, and I hope you get carpal tunnel syndrome from all your typistry

27

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Mic won't work with Vista

« on: March 24, 2009, 06:53:02 pm »

Well, I've got a mic working just fine in Vista-64 bit with just plugging it in and starting up the vista voice recognition and microphone setup stuff. Unfortunately there isn't any real way of knowing why a piece of hardware doesn't work on Vista as the drivers are just badly written most of the time. If you go into Control Panel->Sound->Recording and don't see your microphone on the list then it's not plugged in, has a bad connection, or any number of driver related things could be wrong. If it's finding the microphone and it's just hal not working then things get trickier. I find that I have to start up Vista voice recognition and then set it to off so it doesn't try to run any of what I say as commands to it. Just tell me any further information you can provide and I may be able to help out better (ie. microphone being used, are drivers installed for it, all that nonsense).

EDIT: Also be sure when your in the sound settings that your microphone is selected as the default microphone. There should be a green checkmark next to it, and if there isn't right click on the entry and you should see an option to enable it or make it default.
Also if you don't see the device and it's plugged in you can try right clicking in the area where the recording devices are listed and selecting the option "show disabled devices," as this will allow you to see any devices you may have inadvertently disabled so you can enable it.

28

Share Conversations, Experiences, Graphics / More Free Software I found

« on: March 24, 2009, 08:58:50 am »

I've been using The Gimp for about 6 years no problems. It's really a lot better on linux, as the Windows binary does tend to have issues. If you have trouble installing it, try a different version. The version I currently use in Vista for photo editing is version 2.6.4. I think it's the latest version, but it's a bit slow on Vista compared to running it in linux. It works just fine, but it takes a lot longer starting up then I remember any version ever doing. The Gimp is made cross-platform using the GTK+ library, which while originally created just for The Gimp, has evolved to become the basis for the Gnome desktop manager. Due to some of the bloat that GTK+ has obtained over the years the developers of Gimp don't really support Windows and it's mostly up to third-parties to compile GTK+ and The Gimp for Windows and so depending on what has been changed in The Gimp between versions it can lead to it not working on certain configurations. Latest versions of The Gimp have begun to include support for GEGL which is some sort of render-farm type parallel processing system so don't be surprised when the latest version doesn't install in Windows and just keep trying different versions and stick with a version that works.

EDIT: Also on the first list I see Blender. That's a great program. I've been using it for 3D modeling ever since Maya stopped releasing Linux versions. I'll be using it to model for hal once the Ogre based render engine is finalized as Blender has supported the Ogre engine's formats for quite a while now.

29

Ultra Hal Assistant File Sharing Area / Question:Answer plugin???

« on: March 24, 2009, 07:23:06 am »

EDIT: Hal with fuzzy logic could be quite an interesting thing. I had thought about it while making my earlier comment about it, but I also think it would be quite difficult to do correctly as hal would either need quite a complex inference system or a lot of pre-defined rules (ie. if topic is X, measurement Y is short, measurement Z is tall; so X being YY tall is fairly short) for just about everything you can think of (height, weight, cost, etc.) that would need it but which would be quite slow to run in script.

quote:Originally posted by ll420ll

If HAL isn't going to store the Q:A pair, then why does Hal store a question at all?  Just to ask question the later and not remember that it equals the user response?  And why store the answer in User_temp and not paired with the question?

The reason hal stores a question is so that it can parrot it back to you. In many cases this is simply adding to the conversational side of hal, but if your response is written in just the right way (sometimes tricky from what I've seen) it does indeed get paired with your response as a sort of QA pair. I've not managed to look over everything in the main brain script but I'm sure that functionality could be made more reliable.

quote:
Your never going to get an answer to a question by selecting few chosen words and doing a search of an entire DB.  
If I ask HAL "How old am I? Hal never answers this correct for me.
It ignores all but the word "old". It will respond with a random response using the word "old"

The way hal uses it's database does indeed have it's issues, and while a very good A.I. it still has room for improvement. The way hal parses your messages you will find it to be more responsive if you type longer messenges. For a question like "How old am I" without putting the answer directly into the QA brain you may find it difficult getting an answer. As hal sees it the word old is simply a modifier to I, and with the word "How" int he beginning it sees it as a question, but since it doesn't strictly know what the word old means in the same way a human does it doesn't recognize that as being a question about your age. You could say "My age is 24", and then later say "What is my age?" and probably get an answer, but as I said teaching hal can be tricky from my experiences.

quote:
Cefwyn that's really cool your looking into this. Even if HAL didn't reload Q:A table at least it would know next time.  I can see where one huge Q:A table would be a problem. Could Q:A tables be sorted by topic?

As far as I can tell at the moment, hal is programmed to treat specific types of tables differently (ie. brain table, sentence table, etc.). The mainQA table is a brain table, and I'm currently unsure exactly how that affects hals scripts, but I vaguely remember seeing some lines which pass the response into the mainQA to get the reply, so I should be able to mess about with it to see what will work.

30

Ultra Hal 7.0 / My experience so far

« on: March 24, 2009, 07:00:28 am »

quote:Originally posted by Dollar

>>I've just decided to lobotomist my hal as well <<

can someone who can comprehend this situation of spelling??
Didnt One talk about this?

I apologize for my horrendous spelling typo []
Do some degree it is still correct. A lobotomist is a doctor who performs lobotomies, and so as I performed a lobotomy on hal, that makes me a lobotomist. Therefore I decided to act as a lobotomist towards hal. The original sentence wasn't fully grammatically correct, but still in essence had the right meaning. Definitely more grammatically correct then your question, I must say[]

MikeA: yesterday while I was searching through the forum I came across a Hal 6.0 updated version of the XTF brain. I think it was fixed by OnTheCuttingEdge. I'm pretty sure either it was in his D.A.V.I.D. project plugins thread or a thread linked from that one.