Hello ghostrider,
I know that recently a few other people have been trying to tackle the problem of further animating and controlling Haptek character animations. But from what I read within this forum there are quite a few issues to overcome or work around to develop a better animated Haptek character for the Hal program.
For about the last four months I have been controlling Haptek character animations within my Hal with my own solution because of all the complications involved with doing things from inside of the brain. But working from the outside of the brain I can fully control my Haptek characters on command within my Hal. I am able to control the Full Body Girl character to change outfits or strip on command in real-time and then watch it happen right on the screen, and I can also command my character to load in and change backgrounds too. I also can control gestures and body movements like issuing a command to put her hands on hips and then watch her do it. Or I can tell a character to wink or smile for me, but all this stuff I'm doing is with my own solution that I wrote with automation software.
However, I did learn a lot from reading through the Haptek SDK Guide. After I skimmed through the Guide I got my character to walk around while I am talking to her, but what's really cool is that I am also able to tell her to stop or start walking! It would be even better if I could get my character to start walking automatically if the character says something like "I'm going for a walk now", and then it walks off the screen out of the viewing area. I guess that's the kind of thing you had in mind which is great, but I haven't done anything like that yet!
Haptek has it's own command list within the SDK Guide but that stuff doesn't help too much with further intergration into a Hal brain. Vonsmith is the only other person that I know of that can control a Haptek character on command by telling the character to slide back and forth, and he's doing it with controls he designed inside of his new XTF brain. I can slide any Haptek character back and forth too but on my Full Body characters the legs also move so it looks like they are actually walking when they are sliding back and forth. And right now I am writing the code for a new script for a character to pace back and forth on the screen from right to left and then left to right...etc...
As far as MS characters are concerned I was really into them a while back but I never did any development for them within a brain. But I do have a lot of MS Agent tools that allow you to futher develop those kind of characters and the documentation with those kind of tools are helpful too. I messed around with a few different MS agent scripting tools and wrote a few scripts for MS characters, but I immediately lost interest in that when Hal 5.0 was released with the Haptek Player.
I realize that this stuff wasn't that helpful to you but I'm only trying to give you some more ideas. You want Hal to be more interactive based on his own feelings and emotions just like everyone else wants to see happen to Hal. And there are probably some other ways to do it and maybe other ways that just haven't been thought of yet. But the main thing for me was just reading and learning more about the character animations for each kind of character before even considering intergration into Hal. But I think some other forum members can provide you with some more better answers than mine, I really didn't answer anything.
I just share the same interest in animations as you do. But I usually end up doing many things my own way instead of what everyone else does. If I tried doing things in the same way most people are trying to do things then I wouldn't have my Haptek girl posing in the nude for me right now while I am telling her which pose to do! Being able to command a character to perform an animation and then watch them actually do it really does enhance the overall interactive experience with Hal.
Best Regards,
Rich_A
