[Art]

Your remark about, "I'm going for medieval period..." made me think of a comedian named, Steven Wright. He has a wry, dry, deadpan yet hilarious sense of humor and delivery.  He said, "I went to a restaurant that serves "Breakfast Anytime". So I ordered french toast during the Renaissance."

[8pla.net]

Anyone have any thoughts about that ?

If you program Visual C++...  You could build a First Person Shooter game.
Perhaps get a used book with the source code on a CD for cheap:

Programming Mutliplayer FPS Direct X, 1st Edition
ISBN: ISBN10: 1-58450-363-7

( But on second thought, you are already using Unity now. )   

Another idea...

You might try some different backgrounds...  Without adding geometry.

[Freddy]

Ahh the summer breeze...the lively sounds...but who is this... ?

(Switch to 720p or click through to Youtube for better quality)

[Art]

That was very cool Freddy! Yes, agreed, she was very fair of face, indeed!!

I almost got dizzy with those grasses waving and bending to and fro (as they would say).

Other than a slight delay in the speech from typed to spoken, I liked it quite a lot and the 3D (maybe) world seemed very nicely done as well.
I thought I recognized some AIML coding in there as well which is fine but could stand with some behind the scenes tweaking and rewriting as
we all have come to know. Certainly not a shortcoming of yours by any means. "then you must know the password, etc...."

Is this more of Unity's magic? Looking really good!!

[Freddy]

Thanks Art, yes this is Unity still. It does some neat things.

Yes this character has a pretty face, it's the new one I mentioned. 

You are right of course, this is Jess connected to my Pandorabots account. The AIML in there is pretty much as it came. I've not done any actual writing of new AIML for her yet - hence the standard replies. I was just seeing how the chatbot aspect would go.

There are a few delays with the Pandorabots server. I'm still coding my own AIML interpreter and will run that on my Linux box. It should be a lot faster.

Really it's a proof of concept, but I admit I couldn't wait to 'talk' to her, that was cool 

[8pla.net]

Wow!   Hope to see some more.  That was fun!   Wonder if adding a male voice synthesis (text to speech) to read the input may make it like a TV show?   How about  writing your own original simple chatbot engine in Unity using C# or JavaScript to follow a story script?   

None of these questions are critiques or even suggestions.  They are simply brainstorming.  I do like it the way it is now.  AIML is a great choice for interactive A.I.   Maybe instead of fake Captain Kirk, you can use AIML to create a fake Xena Warrior Princess?   Hey, that was cool to watch in full screen.

[Freddy]

"I went to a restaurant that serves "Breakfast Anytime". So I ordered french toast during the Renaissance."

I remember that joke, he's a really funny man.

@8pla,

I haven't programmed in C++ for years, I'm currently using C# which I really like.

Thanks for the Wow! I don't get those very often 

There are male voices, the only thing is the added time to get the sound. I still cannot find a way to get the sound to load in the background and by doing so stop the jitters.

As for AIML, yes I think it will work well for this project. I have partly coded an AIML interpreter - I have so far made a working Graphmaster in PHP as I was going to run it as a web service on my Linux box. As it stands it could hold simple conversations but I would like to implement the whole of AIML 1.0 as best I can. I think I may start that this week actually.

Hey, that was cool to watch in full screen.

Cool.  It lost a lot of resolution from the way it appears on my screen, it's actually a lot more detailed live.

[Data]

I like the way she sways and moves around a bit, better than just standing there all stiff. 

My little brain is trying to work out why the 3D engine hangs when waiting for the response. I know it's waiting for the PB server but why is that stopping the engine ? I'm clutching at straws but is it something to do with CPU affinity maybe. 

[Freddy]

Nope it's not that. It's because it waits for web connections to end - I'm trying to find a way to do it asynchronously.

[Data]

OK, so multithread it and assign a core to the chat bit, that should leave the 3D engine to function.

Well something like that 

[Freddy]

That would be the nice way yes. But I can only call the Unity web services on the main thread. Which to my way of thinking is not optimal.

I think I have fixed the delay with waiting for audio to be sent from the server though. I just sent in a large audio request to my server and while waiting the GUI was uninterrupted.

As for the pandorabots bit I am still looking into it...

[Art]

Freddy,

Isn't the AIML standard currently at 2.0? Just curious since you mentioned 1.0. Type-o or a particular reason?
(don't say because 1 comes before 2) 

Cant weight two sea mor uv yor wurk! (Here bots...check that for grammar & usage).

[Freddy]

Fixed the lag 

There's a way to use coroutines that run asynchronously. Three things were causing the lag - the audio, the phoneme timings (used to animate the mouth) and the reply from Pandorabots. Now these run to the side and there's no more lag on screen.

Art, yes AIML 2.0 is the newest. I may go for that eventually -I haven't really looked at the new stuff - but for now I am working towards AIML 1.0

[Data]

Well done Freddy, knew you could do it 

[8pla.net]

Just having a little fun playing around with Blender, different colors, looping, etc.
Hey look: Resized this video to 640x360 and those black side bars are gone.

Music: Dub Zap
Artist: Gunnar Olsen
(Music provided by YouTube as a video enhancement)