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!
