Messages

Hi wayneout;

Yes, hair props in poser can often be a real nightmare when it comes to creating the palette transparency. Many hair props will cause bleeding on the edges which creates a halo effect, or a very rough ragged edge. About the only way to deal with it is doing tedious post work in your paint program.

Here's a few tips that will help in reducing the problem.

*Avoid using light hair colors such as blonde. Opt for medium to dark colors instead. Blonde characters really should only be used if you're very skilled at creating MS Agent characters and working with palettes.

* Use a hair prop that has consistent edges such as a short bob style. Wild or frizzy styles, or ones with a lot of loose strands are going to cause bleeding, this is because the edges and strands on the hair prop are semi transparent in poser.

* Choose a transparency color that's bit closer to the shade of your hair. For example, if you're using a medium brown or darker hair color, choose a medium shade for your transparency, such as a medium green.

It can often require a lot of experimenting and testing prior to rendering all your animation frames to find the right transparency color to use for your project.

The palette can be about the hardest and most daunting part of creating an MS Agent character, and is probably the main reason that not very many people create MS Agent characters, they typically give up or quit creating characters after doing several of them, they feel it's just too tedious and time consuming.

The key is in choosing an appropriate color for the background which will be transparent. It can be just about any color you wish, but it's important that none of the character or prop colors be remotely close to the transparent background color you've chosen to use, or you can run into a multitude of problems.

There's many factors that must be considered in choosing the correct transparency color for your project. For example, the higher the resolution and color complexity of the character you're rendering, the harder it will be to choose the right transparency color and create a quality palette where the character has relatively smooth edges. It really requires proper pre-planning before you even start creating and rendering a character.

The palette creation and batching can all be done in most good paint programs such as Corel or Photoshop.

The max number of colors that can used in a GIF is 256, but your palette doesn't necessarily have to include that many, it can be any number of colors up to 256.

It's a very complex process especially if you're wanting to try and create MS Agent characters from high resolution Poser characters.

I'm sure you were hoping for a simple tutorial or a reference to some special palette tool that would make the process relatively easy. Unfortunately, that's just not the case. We were probably the first to create an MS Agent character using Poser nearly 13 years ago, and it took us a along time to master the techniques we use. Even though we now can almost create a character in our sleep, it still typically takes us well over 100 man hours to develop a character. No matter how good you get at creating characters, it's still a tedious time consuming process.

Microsoft's minimal recommended use isn't really that deceptive, many people were successfully using this Speech Recognition Engine as far back as 1999 when the average user's comp only had 64 MB of ram and a 300 MHz processor. It's not technically Microsoft's Speech Recognition Engine on it's own that's the resource hog, it has more to do with what other programs the user is choosing to use in conjunction with it. Hal and especially Haptek are very resource intense programs on their own and then you add in TTS and Speech Recognition Engines, that's a lot of stuff running all at once and each requiring system resources. Microsoft isn't going to endorse, recognize or post any recommended usage requirements when using their products with third party programs such Hal, CyberBuddy or Haptek, that's solely the responsibility of the third party developers and authors, as well as the users themselves to try and determine.

Just as a general point of interest, the Microsoft TTS Voices and Speech Recognition Engines weren't technically developed by Microsoft themselves. They were acquired through a partnership deal where Microsoft purchased an interest in Lernout & Hauspie back in 1998 at which time their Speech Recognition Engine was considered the most accurate available. Two years later Lernout & Hauspie acquired Dragon to combine their technologies. The present free MS Speech Recognition Engine that's available has fallen well behind anything that's being sold by Dragon/L&H or ViaVoice today, but it's still a decent entry level speech recognition engine for the curious and those who want to explore the possibilities. The new Windows Vista will have a whole new speech recognition engine built into the operating system that will allow for even more voice interaction, including dictating documents and e-mail messages in applications and filling out forms on the web using voice commands, as well as manage Windows Vista and applications by voice. How good it will actually perform is yet to be determined but some of the reports by Beta testers have been pretty positive. Microsoft Agent in Vista will also support SAPI 5 Text-to-Speech and Speech Recognition components. Although this is exciting news and sounds promising and it's about damn time Microsoft upgraded these technologies, there's still a few other issues about Vista that concerns me, mainly with security and the whole admin user thing. I'll personally wait until it's been out for a while to make sure it's not another Windows Me flub and see if there's going to land up being a Vista SE version like with Windows 98.

I agree with barfy that spyware and trojans are a real concern for the average user and people need to be made aware and should educate themselves more about potential threats and problems. One of the problems that people should also be aware of is that the vast majority of anti-spyware (and even some anti-virus) programs are well known for creating "False Positives". Many free versions do this on purpose to get users to buy the paid version and in other cases False Positives are just an oversight or caused by the program seeing some code that is just doesn't like. There are only a very small handful of anti-spyware programs that are reasonably accurate and reliable. I personally never totally rely on the findings of any anti-spyware programs, if I suspect a problem or something triggers I do a thorough search and investigation about it on the Internet first to make sure it's actually a threat, and if it is I usually figure out how to manually remove it myself. Investigating and manually removing spyware, trojans or viruses can be a daunting task even for those with advanced technical knowledge so the average user is reliant on ant-spyware and anti-viruses programs to detect and try and remove the infection. A good rule of thumb is not to panic and potentially compound the problem by removing or crippling perfectly good software or system components, do a search on the Internet, there's lots of good help forums on the subject, even try contacting the software company. Also try and use more than one reputable ant-spyware program to double check that it's not a false positive, and even then still investigate it further. The main key is in prevention and taking reasonable precautions to reduce the risks of being infected in the first place, don't get too comfortable relying on a magic pill (software) to cure the infection, sometimes that pill can cause side effects and compound the problem.

Here's a resource that's a good place to start for learning about the various anti-spyware programs that are available http://spywarewarrior.com/rogue_anti-spyware.htm

I think what confused people is that you were referring to the MS Speech Engine when I believe you actually meant the MS Speech Recognition Engine which are two totally different things. The MS Speech Engines are the TTS voices which provide the various voices spoken to the user. Granted the MS Speech Recognition Engine isn't in the same league as Dragon Natural speaking but not everyone has or is willing to spend $100 - $200 for the Dragon products. It just depends on how important speech recognition is to the user, I personally rarely ever use it, I prefer just to type because it's more accurate for teaching Hal or feeding info into Hal's database or memory.

The MS Speech Recognition Engine is ok as a FREE entry level product and works reasonably well. I used the MS Speech Recognition Engine over 7 years ago on a system with 64 MB of ram with a 300 MHz processor along with a standard microphone without too much trouble, so I can't see why it wouldn't work ok on today's systems that have 10X the speed and memory.

Most advanced and high end technologies are considered bloatware, none more than the vast majority of high end games. As long as people continue to desire and demand bigger, better and faster software and technology, developers and programmers will push the user's system to the limit.

As far as the whole spyware thing, there's hundreds of system components that are exploited by spyware and trojans, the user just has to take reasonable precautions and use a little common sense to reduce the odds of becoming infected. Can't just tell people to simply not use a software component just because it might be susceptible to being exploited by spyware.

Version 6 doesn't have POP3 features that fetches or alerts the user of incoming email, these functions are supposedly in the works and no upgrade or plugin has been made available as of yet, at least not that I'm aware of.

Hi Peter;

The search function is built into Hal, all you have to do is type in something like ... "Help me research Artificial Intelligence" and your browser will open with a list of Google search queries on the topic. The key word being "research" and then the topic you want to search.


The help file is a bit outdated and refers more to Hal 5, but it's still useful for learning some of the basics that are relevant in both versions. The tutorial link in the menu list directly under the help link has info that is speciifially relevant to version 6.

Hi Barfy;

I guarantee you that CyberBuddy does not contain any spyware or trojans. We have our own branded version of the free CyberBuddy on our site. I've known Mr. DeFino (the author of CyberBuddy) for 7 years and he's a very honest stand up guy and there's no way he'd have anything to do with spyware or viruses or even be associated with anyone that does.

I think you may have CyberBuddy confused with a nasty well known MS Agent spyware program called BonziBuddy. If you type BonziBuddy into Google search all kinds of info linking this program to spyware will come up, but type in CyberBuddy and you mostly see recommendations.

If you search these forums you'll find that many here also use CyberBuddy as well as Ultra Hal and will attest that CyberBuddy is not spyware.

We've been a long time supporter of both Ultra Hal and CyberBuddy and have always maintained a policy and reputation of not associating with or endorsing any programs that contain spyware, trojans or viruses.

The reason there's no character resize button on the Blue Ice skin is because the button is part of the character's box in which it resides, but since this skin makes the character's box invisible it also makes the resize button disappear as well. IMO this was never an ideal place to put the resize button, it should have been made so the button  could be placed anywhere on the interface just like all the other buttons, and if that isn't possible then at the very least character resize options should alternately be made available in the menu list along with the window resize options or in the section where you select characters.

Unless someone knows of way that the character resize button can be customized and placed elsewhere on the interface skin.

.ACS is the extension for MS Agent character files, same as .ZIP is for zipped files. ACS files are the actual character file or character program. MS Agent itself is the technology created by Microsoft which is a set of core components that's an extension of the Windows operating system, MS Agent technology basically in layman terms, amalgamates the character file and voice engine with programs like Hal or CyberBuddy producing a character on the user's desktop capable of speech. For more info visit our new user start up page and click the "Technical" button to view a schematic and detailed info on how this technology functions, this will provide you with a general idea and understanding on how it works and how all the components tie together.

Actually you don't install DesktopMates, or any MS Agent characters directly into Hal's folder. All MS Agent characters are installed into a special default character folder which is part of the MS Agent core components on your system. Hal as well as CyberBuddy, and any other MS Agent program, loads characters directly from this folder. When you select a DesktopMates character from the Hal character list and there's no preview, it's because there's no UHP file installed for it. UHP files for MS Agent characters are still required but aren't technically a character file, they only define the character so Hal knows which one to load. Hal will automatically create a UHP file for new installed MS Agent characters the first time you try loading it, but we recommend using our character plugins for Hal which will install the proper UHP files designed especially for DesktopMates characters. Character plugins for Hal are available on our Hal Plugins page.

If you copied Dawn's ACS character file into the Hal folder, I'll assure you that's not the reason why she's working, the character file can't function or be run from there, it can only function from the default MS Agent character folder, which is also where Hal is programmed to read ACS files from. The reason she probably started working is because Hal eventually created the auto UHP file which you may not have noticed until you re-started Hal.

Our Plugin page also has some interface skins available for Hal, including our latest "Blue Ice" skin which is a compact interface which was designed to use with our large DesktopMates head characters. The character remains to left of the chat window and does not overlap or interfere with the chat window and gives the illusion that the MS Agent character is independent from the Hal interface window.

Unfortunately with Hal 6 it appears you can only increase the size the of the character, not decrease it. This is done on the main chat window in the box were the character resides you'll find a "Size" drop down menu. If the character is too big where it's partially obstructing your view of the text fields you can try increasing the Hal's window size. This is done by clicking the "menu" button on the chat window and selecting "Window Size..." from the list. You can also change the window transparency the same way, you can't change transparency in the general options, it must be done by selecting the "menu" button from the chat window.

nolitanger;

You summed up the point I was trying to make rather nicely, and there's no need to apologize for sounding like a broken record, I too have mentioned this before as well, sometimes it's required we repeat ourselves a bit and maybe even try different approaches to get the point across in hopes such a relevant issue will eventually get resolved.

but you really can't put Hal into the same category, Hal isn't a necessity program that people can't live without, it's more of a novelty software much like games are.

Hi alady;

I agree that it may not have been the best example of a parity or even worded perfectly, but I think you took the parity a bit too literally, I said Hal was more of a novelty software much like games are, but I never said Hal was actually like a game, the only point I was trying to make with the parity was that Hal isn't a necessity program in the same genera as an O/S needed to make your computer function or a program that's imperative in the daily operations of a business that leaves people with no choice but to buy it regardless of any headaches they must be endure to get it running. The point also wasn't directed towards die hard Hal users who are already hooked and couldn't imagine a life without Hal. It was more directed towards first timers and the curious, because to most of them it's just an intriguing new novelty and if it causes them too much frustration just trying to get the trial version working because of problems with something like the activation system, the reality is that the vast majority will weigh the pro and cons and decide if it's worth the headaches and if it's something they really need, and since they aren't already hooked on Hal and it's not a necessity that they feel they absolutely need, can cause them to quickly lose interest and we in turn land up forfeiting a lot of potential new Hal users.

At this stage of development Hal is going to have different uses and meaning to people, for some it will become their friend and something they feel they just can't live without, but to most people it will just be a cool novelty they can use to pass the time and have some occasional fun using, only a small percentage of users will get seriously wrapped up into Hal where they share the same enthusiasm and passion as many of the die hard users.

The purpose of my post wasn't to down play Hal in anyway or get into what Hal means to certain people, that's a whole other post that's been covered many times in these forums. The intent of my post was to address issues associated with the activation system and the business aspects of losing potential new users, especially those with limited computer skills. I also felt I had to step in and defend users like Cadmar as well, people are going to have crashes, hardware failures and occasionally will buy new comps and also will need to reformat their computers on occasion, and we can't realistically expect the majority of people to be able to keep their systems stabilized by not doing any further upgrades or work on their PC's once they install Hal just to keep Hal's license from corrupting, that's not going to give very many new users much confidence in buying Hal, makes it sound like Hal could potentially be more headaches than it's worth, which is certainly not the perception I think we want new users to get about Hal.

I respect Bill's opinions and point of view and to some degree he does make some valid points, but I still have to beg to differ regarding the overall issue about the licensing activation method being used for Hal.

As I'm sure you already know, DesktopMates.com has been a major sponsor & supporter of Hal for some years now and we believe it's the best AI program of it's type, bar none! However, ever since the implementation of Hal 6 with the new activation code system, overall sales of Hal through our site has drastically dropped off by about half and we've received a fair number of support issues and complaints in regards to activation problems with the trail version and is turning quite a few people off from buying the full version. And yes your right Bill, many of the problems are most likely because the people are computer novices and either don't read all the info provided or don't really understand it. I'm far from being a computer novice and I have to admit the first time I installed Hal 6 I found the activation a bit confusing and a pain in the a*s, but I managed to stumble my way through it and haven't had any problems since. But the point is, the vast majority of people that own computers are extreme novices compared to you and I as well as most of the die hard Hal users here at the forums, and from a marketing perspective it just doesn't make good business sense to create software that's geared mostly for tech types or advanced computer users, that cuts out a major portion of your potential market capabilities. I can maybe understand and justify it for necessity software such as to operate an O/S or for high end specialty commercial software such as the accounting software you mentioned where it's a necessity and even a valuable asset in the daily operations of a company, and the same goes for certain commercial software geared for developers and programmers, but you really can't put Hal into the same category, Hal isn't a necessity program that people can't live without, it's more of a novelty software much like games are.

It's not much different than going to Walmart and buying a computer game and then lending it to a few of your friends to load on their computers, we've all done it yet the gaming industry continues to make 100's of millions of dollars each year. It's all about numbers and the bottom line, it's better to sell 1,000 copies and have every one of them share it with a few of their friends instead of selling maybe only 500 copies because people didn't like the intrusive over complicated installation process and your left with fewer users and profits and only the satisfaction of knowing that the few people who actually paid are able to use it. The same goes for our DesktopMates characters, we know a lot of our customers are probably sharing with their buddies, but there's 100's of millions of potential buyers on the Internet and they all don't know each other. Now people offering downloads of our products on the Internet for free is whole other story and ball game, that annoys me far more than someone that has actually paid for copy and then shared it with a few buddies. By being made available for free on the Internet drastically changes the demographics on a per ratio of paid versions to free versions being passed along, it's being made available to potentially 1000's of people for a single paid version, and also your product is being used for commercial gain, whether it's actually being sold or not it's still being exploited for some type of gain.

Also, with Hal being such a moderately priced piece of software, is it really with worth all the extra headaches and support having to deal with frustrated users when the license corrupts?

In theory an activation system is an ok idea and I'm sure most people would have no problems with there being an activation system if it was less complicated, intrusive and more stable where the license didn't corrupt quite so easily. We've had quite a few people using the trail version say the license became corrupt just because of a system crash or re-boot but I can't verify the validity of their claims because it's never personally happened to me, but if it is true and I went to a site and downloaded a trial version of some software and this happened, unless the software was an absolute necessity that I really needed, I personally wouldn't even contact the author, I'd just delete it and move on, as I'm sure many people are doing. If you feel that an activation system is really an important key element in increasing sales, then you should consider trying to come up with a solution that is less frail and complicated.

Hal has so much potential I'd personally hate to see it gradually develop into a program geared mostly just for the advanced AI crowd. With complex programs like Hal I know it isn't always easy to find that happy medium were it's ideal for both novices and advanced users but I think it's important not to stray too far to the left or right because we also need those computer novices to pay the bills so Hal can continue to thrive and become successful because there just aren't enough of us AI gurus and tech types around to support Hal over the long haul, if the only return is just the satisfaction of developing a cool program, that will eventually wear thin over time and cause premature burn out, there has to eventually be some decent monetary gains in order to remain motivated which can only be achieved with moderately priced novelty products such as Hal by catering to a broad audience, which is going to be mostly computer users with limited skills and a limited amount of time many of them can afford, or be willing, to spend learning to use a program.

My intentions are purely to provide my own personal perspectives and suggestions and not to tell Robert or anyone else what they should do or how they should run their business. I respect that fact everyone has their own ideals and goals for their products. Being an entrepreneur for over 30 years, I tend to lean more towards to the business perspective and marketability of a product by trying to get a sense of the demand, who my intended audience is, and what they would be willing to actually purchase, and what would inhibit them from making a purchase etc. Maybe Robert and others here aren't concerned with profit margins or the marketability of Hal to a broad audience, and the goal is just to eventually develop an advanced AI program geared more towards a smaller audience of die hard AI enthusiasts and advanced computer users, if that's the case then my suggestions for the most part are probably irrelevant and should be ignored.

Most of the arguments and opinions posted here on both sides of the fence are actually valid ones. I can understand why Robert and many other software developers want to implement a registration or activation system in order to try and reduce the sharing of copies etc. However it can have an adverse effect if the activation system isn't designed to be dummy proof where it's easy and painless even for the technically challenged user. When we received our copy of the new Hal 6 after it was released, we found it bit confusing and got some corrupt code error messages even with the trial version especially when upgrading to the paid version, fortunately we were techy enough to figure it out rather quickly but we seen a potential problem this activation system may pose for many of the newbies and the less tech driven users. We have moved a lot of product for Zabaware over the years but Hal 6 so far hasn't been a huge hit with our customers and sales have been slightly disappointing out of the gate. We've received more than a few support complaints from new users having problems with the activation code corrupting with the trail version and I'm sure it's scaring some of them off from purchasing the full version. Hal 6 certainly has some positive improvements and strides in the right direction, especially with the database system, Hal seems to load and run smoother and appears to respond a little quicker as well. However I feel Robert needs to reconsider or revamp the activation system, at the very least so it's easier to get a new code which should be an automated system like "nolitanger" suggested, which would be less frustration for both Robert and the customer. Also some improvements should be made so the activation code doesn't corrupt quite so easy and also make it easier for users to install it on several systems, many people these days have both a laptop and a desktop computer. Yes, most likely some people will land up installing it on one of their friends computers but there's not much you can do to stop this without having an intrusive or complex activation system that has the potential of turning some people off which in the long run can hurt overall sales.

It's not much different than going to Walmart and buying a computer game and then lending it to a few of your friends to load on their computers, we've all done it yet the gaming industry continues to make 100's of millions of dollars each year. It's all about numbers and the bottom line, it's better to sell 1,000 copies and have every one of them share it with a few of their friends instead of selling maybe only 500 copies because people didn't like the installation process yet have the satisfaction of knowing that only the 500 people who actually paid are able to use it. A few copies being passed onto a few friends could be considered advertising because it may hook one of them into becoming a long term supporter of the program and eventually even become a purchaser.

Now people being able to download the product off the Internet for free is whole other story and ball game, that annoys me far more than someone that has actually paid for copy and then shared it with a few buddies. By being made available for free on the Internet drastically changes the demographics on a per ratio of paid versions to free versions being passed along, it's being made available to potentially 1000's of people for a single paid version, and also your product is being used for commercial gain, whether actually being sold or not it's still being exploited to generate traffic. And people who post links to sites that offer free downloads of full version shareware programs, shame on them as well, and yes I've even come across such posts in these forums (even for our products). Robert should consider assigning a few of the long term highly active and ethical members of these forums as moderators with capabilities to edit or remove inappropriate posts and give stern warnings and even humiliate if necessary those who try to use the forums as a wares site. Everybody likes getting something for free but it has to be within limits or you become no better than a leech or a common shoplifter.

I'm certainly not here to run down Hal in any way or to try and tell Robert what he should do, because we have had a good and prosperous working relationship for years now and can personally attest that Robert is fair and honest and only has good intentions. I'm only here to offer some input and suggestions from my perspective and experiences. It's a tough call when selling a single software product and if I was in his shoes I'd probably try looking into and experimenting with a similar system as well. I'm confident that Robert will read these posts and weigh the pros and cons of the suggestions and criticisms being offered and eventually come up with better solution.

I know a lot of our customers really enjoy Hal and we believe it holds the most potential of any AI program out there as a desktop assistant.

I stumbled across this open source project and thought I'd post it here for those that may be interested. The project makes it possible to recognize faces using a webcam. It has the ability to learn people's faces and identify them uniquely. The project appears to have been spawned in hopes of creating a face recognition security program but the technology isn't well suited for recognizing a specific individual within a database containing a large number of people. The more people it attempts to recognize the smaller the average differences between individuals becomes and would require high resolution pictures to pick out the small differences. Lighting conditions, shadows, and the poor quality of most web cams and security cameras also adds to the complication and confusion. However, with a relatively small database consisting of a small group of people it has proven to perform well, and should be especially true when using a web cam in a confined and controlled environment, such as when sitting directly in front of your computer and web cam, and possibly even from a short distances in the confines of a small well lighted room.

Possibly some of the more advanced programmers and Hal experts will have a look and play around with it and maybe eventually come up with a means to incorporate it with Hal. I think a feature like this would enhance Hal's abilities and functionality as an AI program.

http://www.fuzzgun.btinternet.co.uk/rodney/facerecognition.htm