Zabaware Support Forums
Zabaware Forums => Ultra Hal 7.0 => Topic started by: ender on April 15, 2009, 08:12:15 pm
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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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what you describe to me sounds more like some processes going on in the background. I've been doing video stuff lately, and the background processes often makes my software look like it needs an upgrade badly lol....but then suddenly I get some pop up that says "your blah blah software has been updated"
My first suspicion is to chack whats going on behind the machine, for example...disconnect from the internet and see if you have the same issue or if it eases up ...sometimes programs in the background are updating without your knowledge, add to that all the tsr's that a system may be running.....something may be bringing your ram or cpu usage to max leaving the haptek looking guilty.
I just downloaded this free task manager called AnVir Task Manager for such a purpose, else my computer would ask me to reboot every 15 minutes from these constant "you are now updated with the latest version" messages that often cripple me when Im doing work.
I dont know if this will fix your problem, but the freezes sound familiar!
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ender,
Apparently, Haptek does not play well with vista on all machines.
While I don't know if this is an issue on all computers running Haptek, mine suffered with graphics problems (hesitations, jerky displays) that I removed Vista and put XP back. There were other issues with other problems as well. My computer was rated as Vista compliant but as I mentioned, there were many issues and I felt it was not worth weeding / dealing with every one of them for a few bells and whistles.
Good luck!
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thanks for the suggestions.
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I never upgraded to vista, ( knock on wood ) so I really don't know it...but doesn't it have a computability mode like xp that may help fix those issues ? if bootcamp for Mac can run everything from windows, why can't windows run everything for windows ? Do they make a bootcamp for windows, so windows programs can be more compatible with windows ? lol
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ender
I had a similar problem when trying to use Haptek with Vista, I have Vista and Xp in the same machine and I'm not having problems when using Haptek in XP. I also have an older P4 with XP and Haptek, no problems there also. I'd thought it was Vista that was the problem.
Just tried Sandy, in Vista, in the Haptek player and I'm suprised but as you said she is okay in the player.
Carl2
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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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My rec would be to go back to something like XP that works and wait for Windows 7 to see how it handles graphics apps.[:)]
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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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for what its worth about the vista problems i read somewhere that microsoft is suppose to be coming out with another program upgrade from vista (hopefully they will be smart enough to base it more on windows xp i beleive after all the trouble everyone had with vista and even downgraded to xp i think microsoft will be more carefiul this time around and not just try to shove stuff down the publics throat as it were .
dont remember where i read that article (i am like my computer "not enough memory " lol ![:D]
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Haptek and Ogre are NOT agents like MS Agents. One reason that I was told is that the MS Agents were not current with SAPI compliance among other things.
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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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quote:
Originally posted by ender
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.
Ender
7 Rocks!!
You just have to download the agent program as 7 does not come with it, it has to be a 'on purpose' decision from the user.
It also has Direct X,11 , so video is better, (MS foresees multiple GPU's on cards instead of SLI )
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I ran Hal in Windows 7 beta for about a month, it worked fine with agent and Haptek characters. Had to revert to XP media center to use ALL my favourite programs (nothing to do with Hal)
But I was using the 32 bit vs. IMHO the 64 bit vs of Vista and win 7 are not as compatible with Hal and seem to be more likely to encounter problems.
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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.
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Yes, like a lot of us here, we have been disappointed by Haptek for a long time in this regard. I too would not be surprised to see them vanish, they just don't seem to want to support their product any more.
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quote:
Originally posted by ender
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.
I would say that you are correct about the vanishing act to come.
I will also say that based on your statement, you will NOT be owing a copy of People Putty!
With a good R&D program and some dedicated managers and customer support, they could have been a force to recon with in today's market for virtual characters but they choose a different path. Pity that!
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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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Amen, re: Haptek could own the avatar market.
Are there any ex-Haptek employees out there who could tell us why they gave up?
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Maybe ex-Haptek employees have lost their soul in Second Life, but found much money at Linden Lab. Not only L$.[:D]
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I heard back from Haptek ... apparantly the software is not abandoned... here is what they had to say:
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... 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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ender,
That's interesting news in light of Vista and the forthcoming Win 7 (or Lose 7)...;)
The lifelike character arena belongs to Poser and Daz aside from any characters modeled in say 3DS MAX, Maya or other 3D app. The problem was interfacing the poser character to that of an acceptable GUI or other interface that would allow interaction with Hal.
I agree that I too was taken by the randomness of the Haptek character's eye movement, dilation, blinking, etc. Of course the polygon count would have made for such a better model if it were higher or at least high enough to avoid the somewhat sharp facial edges while keeping the FPS at a moderate rate.
There are plans for Robert, Hals developer to incorporate the Ogre 3D graphic engine in a soon to be released version of Hal so you might want to stay tuned. I understand they are working on creating additional characters and fine tuning everything before final testing / release. Hopefully, they will lend some attention to the polygon issue in order to achieve a more realistic character.
Iclone has some fairly nice characters along with a nice development environment but again, merging that with Hal would be quite an undertaking.
Robert has developed and supported his product over the years and provided a great measure of enjoyment and experimentation for a very nominal cost. I'm sure the next version will be every bit as enjoyable!
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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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Bizarre, I can't think why installing my program would make a difference. It must be that there are some things in .net 3.5 that have an effect.
So Hap Explorer is working in Vista then ? That's good news as I really didn't want to mess around with it any more.