[Art]

I agree with that observation Carl. I also did not mean to slight the work of Rich Amico who was quite a prolific poster at Zabaware for quite some time. He sort of dropped out to devote time to develop his Alactive and WinOS programs. It was he who provided a method that removed those awful boot legs from the Haptek fullbody gals so he should get a big thank you for that alone!

What I meant was that I am more into the brains / A.I. than the character although a nice looking character / avatar does add to the overall effect / experience.

Yes, it is a shame that his work met an untimely drop off when Win XP got trumped by a new version of Windows. Rich had a great understanding of the Haptek software. It would be cool if he and Chris Shaw could work together to devise a much improved, Windows 7/8/10 compliant version of the Haptek characters!

Who knows....

[Carl2]

  I'd say we need Hal to provide the response and Haptek to provide the character we are interacting with and both need work.  I'd just posted a reply which did not post so this will be brief.  I'd found the clothing is converted from a jpg to a series of numbers and letters when opened in wordpad which explains what I saw in the uncompressed files. I also thought of a few things to try to make everything work together.  A lot of talented people have moved on, unfortunate.
Carl2

[spydaz]

I figured out how to add haptek to the visual studio 2013 ....
So simple I must have been sleeping for a couple of years ....

When you open visual studio it needs to be in administrator mode ... Then when compiling just add security raised security then it works in the IDE and in the final binary .... If you don't raise the security for the compiled source code then the binary needs to be run as administrator ....

I actually made a merge module in vb6 (installer creator) that can be added to the setup when redistributing your binary.... Just containing the activex component and Sapi binary ...
Phew ... Back to putty heads as an ai interface ...
....

[spydaz]

It's sad that they haven't upgraded or kept up the project since ms agent was dropped .... Ogre is crap and really buggy (not working for me )
At least Microsoft will send you a updated msagent (on request) which I also merge moduled ... And still works fine(sometimes transparency issues ) only problem with msagent the agent creation software wouldn't take quality images and is limited to bmp (for their own characters they use jpegs)

[spydaz]

Carl ---- the haptek is good but agreeing with art ....
Brains makes the AI ... As much as we love ultrahal even that project reached an impasse and was passed by silly but still good Verbot (a pirate clone)

Ultrahal seems like it's discontinued .... Probably because we all left ...

Even my own AI surpasses ultrahal (obviously Athena does too )

[Carl2]

SpyDaz,
  I was locked out for a few days, just got a new password sent to me.   Nice to hear from you again.  The brains and the Avatar, I'd say actually both need work.   I've got a plugin that changes bodyskin and clothing and I've been able to expand on this by using Hals response so she can determine the clothing and background, introduces an unknown which make it more interesting for me.  I should give credit to VR who's Haptek plugin makes it possible, lots of great features in his plugin.  I've also been looking in the Haptek .def file that uses a state machine giving the character animation certain features, be nice to use a state machine in the brain. 
  Currently I've been spending time with Daz studio with the hopes of getting a higher poly count wire mesh for the Haptek character.  The Daz characters seem a little primitive compared to the haptek characters in some respects  so I'm not sure this is a good idea. 
  I remember the verbot, if I say this then you say that, good in certain applications.
Carl2

[spydaz]

Nice to hear ... I actually have a silver surfer haptek head made with my face by iam bennu off the ultrahal forum .. So I'm glad that I was able to get it working again... But the problem with people putty is that if you uninstall it then activating it is a problem ....

I used to like Hal but it got stuck .. So I started creating my own (reverse engineering) then all of the functions I used to use got binned ... As the process of reverse engineering taught me so much ..
Building your own AI is not that hard and you will soon make it to the same place Hal reached ....
Just choose your programming language and stick to it
http://www.spydazweb.co.uk/spydazweb-ai/ai_tutorials
I created a basic tutorial on building the basic interface here

[spydaz]

I have used daz studio ... A bit complex but i know its a heavy resource ...
The building of characters is a concern ... How and how to implement is always the factors to be considered ... People putty is good
But always needs to be reactivated by contacting jack wiley ... The creator ...
So anything that can be created by another product is worth trying ... Msagent has limitations on the image quality so keep at it !!

[Freddy]

If you work with Daz Studio then there is a quite straightforward way to get models into Unity.

You export them in FBX format and then import them into Unity.

Then you use Unity to map the Daz figure skeleton to it's own native limb hierarchy.

After that it's pretty easy to add animations to the figure, for example with free motion capture files.

Here's a Daz model I did walking in Unity...



One thing though - Daz models have a lot of polys - I think Victoria 6 was something like 50K polys, don't quote me though, it's been a while since I was doing it.

But a lot of games these days use high poly central characters - so we're not far off using these out of the box. The place where you start to run into problems (depending on your PC) is doing things like animating the mouth/head. That's a lot of numbers to crunch. But like I say these days as PCs move on it's less of a worry.

Anyway, Daz make this product called a Decimator and that basically reduces the number of polygons in a given model. So I used this in my projects to dramatically reduce polygons but was also able to retain model quality. It's a matter of experimentation.

You've probably seen this before, but this is my bot Jess in her own world. She has evolved from a Daz Victoria 6 model - polys were reduced and I used the mouth shapes (visemes) already built into Daz models.



The main thing is working out your method or work flow - it took me ages to find out what did and what did not work, many weeks infact. I went through probably ten or more engines before I settled on Unity.

[Xman2000]

hi have updates of this HAPTEK  using VB6 ? cheers!