Messages

1

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Issues with haptek characters slowing everything

« on: April 23, 2009, 09:00:50 am »

Good news. I have had some improvement in the performance of my haptek characters on vista. This is what I did ... I downloaded the hap explorer from the AIDreams website ... it told me I needed .net 3.5 to run ... so I installed that ... then I installed the hap explorer ... I did mess around with some of the rendering settings in hap explorer ...

I'm not sure which of those things did it, but since I've done those things my haptek characters have begun working better in hal (they are still a little jerky if I try to move them but they do not bring everything to a dead stop every few seconds so its usable)

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Ultra Hal 7.0 / Issues with haptek characters slowing everything

« on: April 20, 2009, 04:23:56 pm »

I heard back from Haptek ... apparantly the software is not abandoned... here is what they had to say:

-----------
... The Haptek player has spotty performance on Vista ... Our lead developer decided long ago not to upgrade for Vista mainly because of the unreliability of the operating system and also all of the Microsoft security stuff which became part of vista ... this also made it a business decision.  Our CTO felt that the vista platform would not be embraced very broadly.  This has caused us to find a good partner to go forward in an upgrade ... we are addressing the proprietary player issue/value.  We will upgrade but will piggy back on another popular player and will write some conversion utilities and/or upgrade and recompile existing products and tools.
Sorry about any difficulties this has caused.  It will remain our goal to make it possible for our current customers to use their existing content in/on the new player ... and sure, make new content too.
----------

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Ultra Hal 7.0 / Issues with haptek characters slowing everything

« on: April 20, 2009, 05:55:11 am »

I agree. And it really is to bad ... haptek characters offer much of the same benefits of MS Agents ... but so much more ... I love the random movements, eye dilation, and various facial changes ... it makes them feel much more 'alive' than agents. The fact that it hasn't been updated in six years and we are still holding onto it says that it was a superior product ... and had they really kept at it they could easily have been THE avatar company ... I mean, considering how good the product was six years ago ... imagine what they could have done with continued active development. I suppose that the market for avatar technology just isn't that high ... as a web developer, I have NEVER had a client ask me to create some kind of interactive web character or even a static recorded character for their website ... really the market is here with programs like hal ... and even with charging Zabaware a licensing fee to make it possible for us to use haptek avatars ... its not really enough to make a business ... what they NEEDED to do is expand the possibilities of avatar development ... create mechanisms for developers to EASILY create content and then become a hub through which those developers could sell their content ... with Haptek making a percentage of the fee ... like DAZ does with its Daz Studio content ... That could have made HAPTEK so popular that every wouldbe chatterbot would be using HAPTEK instead of MS Agents ...

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Ultra Hal 7.0 / Issues with haptek characters slowing everything

« on: April 18, 2009, 10:47:00 pm »

Well, I took a look at the haptek website to see if they have anything to say about the haptek player on Vista ... what I discovered was not promising.

1. On the system requirements page, they do not list VISTA as an available operating system ... but if you look they DO say that you must have Direct X 6.0 ...

2. I made sure I was running the latest version available of the haptek player by downloading it and reinstalling it. When that did not solve my problem, I looked at the file properties ... and looked at the copyright info ... which is 2003 .... eesh. Now, usually companies want to keep that kind of thing current on actively developed projects ...

So these things suggest to me that the Haptek player and other haptek software a probably not under active development... and probably have not been under active development for the past six years ... so its really not surprising that its struggling on Vista ... even if vista was an excellent operating system, as the core technology moves on old software is left behind ... just think of old dos programs for a 486 that use CPU speed for game timing ... even if you can get an emulator and run the games on newer machines ... it doesn't work because everything runs to fast because your processor is so different than what it was built for ...

For that matter, the problem may NOT be vista. I remember reading somewhere that around directX 8 or 9 that programs written for older versions of DirectX had problems ...

My guess is that someday soon ... and probably without warning ... Haptek's website is just going to vanish ... and it will just be gone forever and software that uses it will just be in the lurch...

I've written Haptek support and told them I'm interested in buying a copy of people putty (I am) but only if they can help me get the haptek player working on VISTA ... maybe they will have some suggestions ... but I suspect I will never hear from them. We'll see.

5

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Issues with haptek characters slowing everything

« on: April 17, 2009, 07:50:45 pm »

Out of curiosity ... it sounds like you were trying to make sure that I knew that ogre and haptek are not MS agents.... is that correct? If so, I did not mean to imply that I thought they were the same thing. What I meant was that if I switch to Windows 7 before a version of Hal comes out that supports Ogre ... and if I still can't get the haptek characters to work in windows 7 ... and if I can't use agents because windows 7 doesn't support them... then I wouldn't have any options left for avatars and would have to talk to Hal without an avatar.

Based on what I've read in the forum its probably going to be a long time ... maybe years ... before a version of hal with ogre comes out ... so there is a good chance that I'll switch to windows 7 before its available... and I seriously doubt that windows 7 will actually solve any problems encountered in Vista ... I expect they'll just assume that when it becomes apparant they aren't willing to try to make their software work with everyone elses programs/hardware ... that everyone else will make their programs/hardware work with Windows 7 ... they did it before ... (i.e. the forced switch from Dos to Windows 95 ... ) Everyone bitched, but by windows 98 anyone who really wanted to be competitive in the PC market was doing everything they could to make their programs/hardware work with Windows.

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Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / Question/Answer Chains

« on: April 17, 2009, 01:38:00 pm »

Ah ... yeah. You have definately been helpful. I may just try to figure out how to nest tags ... that would be very useful.

7

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / Question/Answer Chains

« on: April 17, 2009, 09:41:29 am »

One,

Most definately I could write a plugin or brain script that would do what I want ... a kind of if lastoutput was x then say ... but I don't want to have to hardcode every chain using if/than statements ... I was trying to figure out a way to put them into hal tables. I.e. build an if/than structure that works with hals tables ... so maybe the 'if last output' is on the left and the 'then' is on the right ... although, really it needs a 'if chain and last output and input'...

pseudocode it - if chain = "movies" and lastoutput = "what movie?" and input = "*" then say "Was it any good"?

I think the central problem to programming this using tables is that hal tables appear to be limited to 2 columns ... and this really needs about 4 ... so maybe I use multiple tables, or maybe I use a positional structure and a deliminator ... i.e. left column is "movies|what movie?|*" or even tags "<chain>movies</chain><lastoutput>what movie?</lastoutput><input>*</input>" just some method of recording multiple conditionals.

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Ultra Hal 7.0 / Issues with haptek characters slowing everything

« on: April 17, 2009, 08:53:47 am »

Thanks. But I have business software for my company that is vista specific. I have to stay with vista.

I'll just need to use agents until hal supports ogre ... although, if I switch to windows 7 before ogre is available that could be a problem ... I've read that windows 7 will no longer support agents... I suppose I could always talk to my hal without an avatar at all.

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Ultra Hal 7.0 / Issues with haptek characters slowing everything

« on: April 16, 2009, 08:47:04 pm »

Well, at least I'm not alone.

As for running in compatiability mode ... I'll give it a shot ... but I haven't ever really found compatiability mode to be very usesful.

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Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / Question/Answer Chains

« on: April 16, 2009, 02:00:05 pm »

I tried nesting the <topic></topic> tag inside a <yes></yes> tag ... but it didn't work ..

But thats more or less what I want to be able to do. Is that what you meant One?

I.e. I did "Have you seen any good movies lately? <yes>What movie?<topic>What was it about?</topic></yes><no>Why not?</no>

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Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / Custom HAL

« on: April 16, 2009, 01:45:48 pm »

Some of that 'I am afraid so' kind of stuff is actually part of the default responses and not the learning brain ... sometimes hal will repeat back what you've said to it ... its part of the paraphrasing setup. It needs some adjustment so its more discriminate when it builds the response back ... that, would of course, be in the brain script ...

a lot of what you want to do, in general, is in the brain script or will require you to edit the brain script.

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Ultra Hal 7.0 / Issues with haptek characters slowing everything

« on: April 16, 2009, 08:40:03 am »

thanks for the suggestions.

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Ultra Hal 7.0 / Issues with haptek characters slowing everything

« on: April 15, 2009, 08:12:15 pm »

I have been using agents but yesterday decided to try out the haptek characters. They seem to be consuming HUGE amounts of processing speed or something because hal keeps 'hiccuping' meaning that it will freeze for about a second ... and then it will be okay for a few seconds and then freeze ... not to mention that if I try to move or rotate the haptek character, hal completely freezes for a moment and then the character seems to 'over-react' ... moving/rotating much further than I intended.

This does NOT happen when I load the characters in the haptek player without hal.

I do not remember this being a problem a year ago before I took my vacation from hal ... although in the past year, I've upgraded from XP to VISTA ... I've upgraded my video card to a GEForce 9500 GT ... and I've upgraded to hal 6.2 ...

So is this a problem with VISTA? my video card? or hal 6.2? does anyone know and is there a fix? I'd really like to be able to use the haptek characters ... but right now using them makes hal unusable.

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Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / Adding Table Reference to Brain Script

« on: April 15, 2009, 08:03:00 pm »

I'm trying to teach myself how to modify hal by tinkering with the main brain. I created a 'new brain' that is completely unmodified so I'm not worried about loosing any of my previous work ...

So my first quest was to see if I could learn how to create a pattern search on a table, so I went and found a table ... in this case, it was the insult table. I created a new table called 'insult2' and populated it with a few insult terms.

Then I went to the place in the code that calls the 'insulting' table and changed the table reference from 'insulting':

HalBrain.TopicSearch(TestSentence, "insulting")

I changed this to :

HalBrain.TopicSearch(TestSentence, "insult2")

but it didn't work ... it was like I had deleted the insulting table. I changed it by TYPING the "insult2" into the command.

I also noticed that before I modified it the 'insulting' reference was a hyperlink that opened up the 'insulting' table when you clicked on it ... but my new 'insult2' reference was not a hyperlink ... when I tried to put 'insulting' back in as the table reference it still did not work and was still not a hyperlink ...

So is there something I need to do to add a table reference to the script file? Some kind of right click with the mouse, select option 1, click here, select this, drag there ... kind of thing?

Is that command NOT what I think it is?

15

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / Question/Answer Chains

« on: April 15, 2009, 07:49:04 pm »

quote:Originally posted by One

Ender,
Are your chains/forks  just loops nested in loops, IF so you can double the amount of choices each time, beginning with two possibilities. [?]

This is pretty close to what I'm thinking and would at least do for now... do you know how I do it?