Messages

16

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / how do I create agents with Poser?

« on: February 10, 2004, 01:51:58 pm »

It's agentcharactors

?

17

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / how do I create agents with Poser?

« on: January 31, 2004, 10:32:36 pm »

Sounds like your experiences are similar to mine.

I think all the desktop mates agents were produced with Poser.

Take a look at www.biovirtual.com for "3DMeNow"

I would really like to have U-Hal be able to work with this...


UPDATE... sorry - they sold out to a big-name big money company. Oh, well...

18

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / how do I create agents with Poser?

« on: January 31, 2004, 07:50:54 pm »

It's possible to create Microsoft Agent characters with Poser by outputting the animations as series of bitmaps, and then converting them to 8-bitcolor depth. Then you need to mask them for transparency. You need a paint program for this - any of them will do.

The software required to create and compile MS Agent characters from 256 color bitmaps is free from Microsoft at the Agent SDK site.

That being said, I found it to be a very involved and time-consuming activity. I've started a couple, but never really finished one because of the remarkable number of animations required to approach a "lifelikeness".

All the MS agent documetation is free - I suggest downloading it and doing a little study to see if it's what you want to do. Don't pay for any books on it at Amazon - they're just the free documents reprinted word-for-word and softcover-bound.

Good luck in your efforts!

19

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / Mr Medeksza - Please one more word on DDE

« on: January 16, 2004, 05:49:41 pm »

I agree that this is an excellent area of development and expansion for Hal.

I would like to equip Hal with the ability to measure human affect - to be able to assess and respond to my emotions and mood. one way to do this is to interface with a Galvanic Skin Response biofeedback unit. Another is through a heart rate monitor and respiration recorder. DDE is one way to go there.

look here to see what I mean...

http://affect.media.mit.edu/AC_research/sensing.html

Again, well done Mr. Medeksza!

20

Ultra Hal 7.0 / question about plugins

« on: January 09, 2004, 04:49:37 pm »

Agent...

If you bought 4.5 just before 5.0 came out, you should have gotten an offer to upgrade... how much before was "right before"?

21

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / HalCommands under Ultra Hal Assistant 5.0

« on: December 03, 2003, 12:25:57 pm »

I did a quick and dirty fix on this by disabling Hal's sensitivity  to the user repeating his statements, which I never cared much for anyway.

I find now that Hal settles into a "TopicFocus oscillation" where what he says tends to follow the changes in the TopicFocus value as it gets incremented and decremented. If you leave him alone long enough, he will pick 5 or six different staements and repeat them over and over again.

With just a little more tweaking and some randomness added, this could work really well...

22

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / Question for the main man

« on: October 30, 2003, 08:54:32 pm »

For whatever reason, my "official" version of Hal 5.0 seems to work much more smoothly and realistically than my updated and massaged version of the Beta release ever did.

A very nicely-executed upgrade, Mr. M. I am very pleased with the program. It is well worth upgrading from 4.5.

23

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Cepstral voices now working with haptek characters

« on: October 24, 2003, 09:37:56 pm »

Wow - amazing how an off-hand comment will solve a problem - I had just assumed the Cepstral voice (which rocks, by the way,) was not lipsync compatible.

After your post, I wen into the Hapek Player Sapi panel and set up Cepstral, and Voila! Lipsync!  Thanks, LB!

24

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Cepstral voices now working with haptek characters

« on: October 24, 2003, 09:34:00 pm »

Ahhh...

I just installed Cepstral voices and they don' lip synch, but I installed them After installing 5.0 upgrade... hmmm....

25

Ultra Hal 7.0 / How much will the new HAL cost ?

« on: October 18, 2003, 01:01:27 pm »

Hal is a bargain at this price. I spent close to a year fooling with the source code to Omnibot to get it to do what I wanted, and Hal was there right away (not to take anything away from Jon Reder's Omnibot. It's a fantastic effort and he sells the source code for $25 in visual basic. You could get to Hal through modifying Omnibot, but hey, here's Hal already). A year's labor for an additional $25 ain't too shabby.

I very much like the fact that Hal can be manipulated so effectively WITHOUT fooling with the actual executable. The possibilities are huge, but the downside risk is minimized. This "modularity" of approach is brilliant, and lends itself to all us hacks having more fun and less frustration.

What's next? emotions? an "ego" and an "id" for Hal? Why not?

Go, Robert!

Doug

26

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Getting Hal to initiate conversation

« on: October 01, 2003, 05:01:44 pm »

Visual Basic has a very useful component called a timer control. you can specify events to occur in response to the timer instead of waiting for the user to react.

The hangup with Hal has apparently been that the VBScript subset of Visual Basic does not include the timer control.

The following article at MSDN appears to indicate that the ActiveX timer control can be accessed from VBScript.

Perhaps the the HalBrainMasters would be interested...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnaxctrl/html/msdn_nctmr.asp?frame=true

The example uses a slide show, but perhaps the same code could put data to Hal and effectively "hit the return key" a certain amount of time after a user response...

just an idea...

27

Ultra Hal 7.0 / The Haptek Interface is a blast!

« on: September 14, 2003, 02:40:12 pm »

quote:Originally posted by midget1488

I had initial problems with PeoplePutty crashing on my Dell 2.0Ghz laptop running XP pro.

Turns out PeoplePutty is dependent on an OpenGL driver that may not be included in the 2000/ME/XP load set. I was able to solve the problem by loading something I found on the Haptek FAQ page. I still occasionally get an odd shutdown BSOD, but the program itself seems fine now.

A U-Hal plugin for 3DMeNow would be excellent. For $15, what a great program, and the interface is amazingly intuitive. All of these (Haptek, 3DMeNow, MSAgent) are Active-X controls - I'd like to see plugins for all of 'em.

Sorry, brainf*rt. It was 3DMeNow I had to fix the drivers on. Haptek stuff has been okay. Was looking for the FAQ to reference and found nothing at Haptek, then it hit me.

Sorry.

28

Ultra Hal 7.0 / The Haptek Interface is a blast!

« on: September 14, 2003, 02:30:58 pm »

I had initial problems with PeoplePutty crashing on my Dell 2.0Ghz laptop running XP pro.

Turns out PeoplePutty is dependent on an OpenGL driver that may not be included in the 2000/ME/XP load set. I was able to solve the problem by loading something I found on the Haptek FAQ page. I still occasionally get an odd shutdown BSOD, but the program itself seems fine now.

A U-Hal plugin for 3DMeNow would be excellent. For $15, what a great program, and the interface is amazingly intuitive. All of these (Haptek, 3DMeNow, MSAgent) are Active-X controls - I'd like to see plugins for all of 'em.

29

Ultra Hal 7.0 / The Haptek Interface is a blast!

« on: September 13, 2003, 12:13:28 pm »

The haptek plugin added to UHal is a hoot to play with. It loads the .HTR characters I created in PeoplePutty flawlessly. You do have to rename the extension to .HTR, but after that no problems.

The emotional responses the Haptars provide are controlled by the .HAP files in the character folder. These control the motion parameters for the "head" object the character is mapped-to. These files can be manipulated with your text editor the same way you manipulate .BRN files. Don't like how often your Hal blinks? change it! Need a bigger grin? You can get it!

The .HAP files appear to be selected by "emotion.brn" . I have not tried creating new emotions and loading them into emotion.brn, but I know PeoplePuttyl allows you to create new emotions, so I think it should be possible. I'll let you know.

I heartily endorse buying PeoplePutty to enhance your U-Hal experience.

Robert, You've outdone yourself!

30

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Pronuciation corrections in L&H British voice

« on: September 13, 2003, 11:57:17 am »

I have switched Hal to the L&H British English female voice, which works very well, but she mispronounces my name. I can go into the adjustment screen and fix it, but when I close out the screen, I get

Run-time error '445': Object doesn't support this action

I suspect the L&H dictionary doesn't support modification to phoneme assignments. I ahevnt tried it from the Windows speech control panel yet.

Just a note to those using alternate voices.

5.0 is AWESOME.[]