Ai Dreams Forum
Chatbots => General Chatbots and Software => UltraHal => Topic started by: Freddy on June 12, 2007, 02:09:32 pm
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A while back Rob at Zabaware announced that they were developing a new system to render UltraHal characters here.. (http://www.zabaware.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=3960)
The work will take around a year to complete so he says, but for anyone interested in getting a head start I have started this thread so we can compare and discuss our experiences with the engine.
Ogre 3D Homepage (http://www.ogre3d.org/)
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According to what I've read about it so far, it is capable of
using mesh character figures from Poser, Cinema and/or 3DsMax.
The Poser figure aspect would be great for those who are
working on a shoestring budget or just aren't into the more
high-end software's.
We've started a similar discussion topic on this over at Virtual Humans Forum as well.
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Yes it seems very flexible..from what I have gleaned from their site it can handle a whole lot more too as it's a dedicated graphics renderer.
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I'l be starting to play around with it a bit after I finish building my
new PC and get all the graphics programs and content installed.
I was also thinking of giving TrueVision 3D a try since that's what
Mikmoth will be using for his Kari 3D software. I'm looking to add
a 3D character choice into one of the modified Answerpad bots
that my forum is working on, but I'd like to stay away from using
haptek if possible.
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hmm..this could reignite my interest in Hal or any other bot app that could make use of this :-\
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Any particular reason for moving away from Haptek Tom ? I was just wondering because for me I have pretty much come to the end of the road in terms of my interest in Haptek. It's time for me to move on to other things I am afraid, Haptek has been fun but I think something new and more powerful is needed if we want to further character development - and Ogre may be just the key.
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My main reason Freddy is that Haptek is just way too proprietary (exclusive & expensive),
they are practically impossible to negotiate with, plus it's been ages since they put out anything new.
I imagine I'll still turn out the occasional head or skin for those who like to play around with it in Hal
or the haptek player, but you can only go so far with it. Besides I've seen that there are now enough
people who have joined the ranks of those making heads & skins that I can move on and leave it to them.
I've turned that part of my web sites over to Jack, and so far he's doing a bang up job for all the hap-heads. ;D
It will be a new challenge that I can undertake to stretch my abilities. :)
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Yeah I do know what you mean, the lack of new things for it has been a real bugbear for the past two years and more that I have know about it. I also found limitations in how it handles things like keyframes and the limits on timed events. So much so I have shelved my animation project in favour of moving on to another character engine. I've got a couple of ideas that may see the light of day for apps that Haptek users might find useful, but for some reason my Visual Basic projects didn't migrate fully to XP from when I was using Windows 2000 and the problem is too technical for me to suss out. I have the code still so when I have a few days spare I will see about re-writing the apps. For me it's also a matter of ending the frustration of so many false starts lol..oh well live and learn.
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Have you tried taking your original code and recompiling it using VB6 in the Windows XP environment?
You may find this interesting as well. Guile from "Guile 3D" is working on a new 2D graphics engine,
as well as a new multi-bot Universal Interface that will allow the user to connect and interact with
up to four different bots at a time - both PC based & web-based.
You can read his post's on them over at Virtual Humans Forum.
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Thanks for the tip but I was moving from Basic Express on 2000 to the same on XP, I haven't used VB6 for a while now. I will just have to break it up into sections to find out where the fault is I think as it doesn't show up in the code. Unfortunately it is some vague internal error which I have never seen before so something is amiss in an area I am unfamiliar with.
That sounds like an interesting project from Guile, I'll take a wander and have a look.
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Freddy,
Thanks for pointing me here, I've been wondering what Gamer has been up to in the way of graphics and respect his opinions on these matters. I'm very interested in other game engines but the project seems to require so much work.
It would be nice to see Hal in an enviorment with gravity that not only affects her hair, love that, much better than DeskMatesdy but I'd like to see gravity affect her body as well. Hal will nerer fall but may float away in space.
I've begun working with uncompressed files so changes can be made to the characters, frist I'd like to find the scripting for the wink and try moving it into a fullbody character and move some scripting from fullbody girl to body female to give her the animations that fullbodygirl is capable of. I'm holding to the past to long but it has what I'm capable of working with.
Wishing you both the best in your efforts.
Carl2
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Thanks for the input Carl2.
Don't worry about being left in the dust in regards to this. I believe it's going to take a while, maybe a year or so
before Robert is able to fully incorporate Ogre into Hal, even at that I don't believe he has plans for completely
eliminating haptek as a graphics option. The way I understood it, he is planning to add Ogre as an additional
option while keeping the MS Agent and haptek characters included in Hal. That means that user's of UltraHal
will then have three choices as to the type of avatar they want to use.
I am just beginning with my own expiments with Ogre and it will be at least a year before the people on my forum
come up with the final release of an Answerpad descendant that may be capable of having Ogre incorporated into
it, besides the MS Agent engine it already uses.
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For anyone wanting to keep track of this that hasn't heard already - this thread over at Zabaware has the most up-to-date discussion on the OGRE engine being incorporated into UltraHal :
http://www.zabaware.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=5678
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Hi all, thought I better join this forum so here I am ;)
Now some thoughts on the Hal 3D engine.
Can't wait to get rid of that ancient Haptek technology, after looking at the Haptek site I see that its Direct X 6, - I mean come on haptek that is almost 10 year old technology now. Are there any 10 year old PC's still working?
Just finished playing the game Crysis the characters in it are so real its mind blowing, shadows that look real, hair that moves like real hair, high polygon counts, awesome textures and the physics engine is simply the best I've seen.
The technology is there to make a very close to real looking human right now.
This is what I mean
(https://aidreams.co.uk/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thatguys.co.uk%2Fuploaded_images%2Fcrysis-20060329002212361-783820.jpg&hash=f911e7d002ebdd5200938a23145c2d1f65bf42b3)
Yes it's awesome,
I hope Hal can look that good in the not too distant future.
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Pre-rendering animationn and modelling has gone even beyond that. It is amazing what recent tools can do. However, in real-time 3d animation things are a bit behind. In that area characters do not look that good. I think this gap has to do with only one thing. Pre-rendering is currently on demand by the cinama industry and it will continoue to evolve untill we will not be able to distinguish the real humans from the digital ones. Real-time from the other hand should have been the focus of the game industry, but there the focus seems to be the enviroment itself and not the actual characters. I recently come across the Star Trek Online promotion video and I was amazed by the quaility of their enviroments, starships, planets, etc but not from the characters. Their characters look even worse that Haptek's. So Untill a better real-time technology will come up I will keep on using Haptek as they are simply the best.
By the way you can have a look at the promo video of the star trek online here. I think it will be massive, even better than second life (sorry SL funs but ST is a way of living for me)
http://www.startrekonline.com/videos
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Welcome to the forum Datahopa it's great to see you here ;D The forum has been quite active lately and members have been posting a lot of quality posts that have kept me hooked, I hope you will keep visiting too :) I'd forgetten about how spooky that avatar you picked is !
As for Crisis, yes I had a sneak peak at the renders a while back and was suitably impressed. I may just have to pay out and get that one, it looks fantastic.
Haptek is getting old in the tooth, but I tend to agree with wgb14 that is still one of the best avatar systems for chatbots and the like. We do really need Haptek to pull it's finger out though I agree whole-heartedly. I'd be pleased if someone just bought them out and got things moving again.
Let's hope all that highly developed animation finally filters down into something we can use in Hal or whatever.
I had a look at Star Trek and it looks like it will be a good one. I tend to only play multi-player games these days so I might look it up, it depends on if they are going to make it subscription based or not. The last Sci-Fi game I really got into was way back and that was Homeworld. Loved that game and also Freelancer.
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Ahhhh, Homeworld! the basis of Game Swarm AI! :D
Freelancer is good as well, but I misplaced my copy before I gave it a serious run-down.
Crysis...hmmm...games like Crysis are good, but I'm well aware they are next-gen; not suitable for Xbox 360's or any other current hardware config (unless you have a 3 month old gaming-dedicated computer) I beleive if games like Crysis are produced, then we should really look into AI dedicated hardware...
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Thanks for welcoming me Freddy, I will try to join in the fun on this forum as often as I can, got very little work on at the moment so came here for something new to do 8)
Now Crysis engine, bear with me on this.
I have an old P4 prescot CPU with 2 GB RAM and only an old ATI X850 graphics card so my system is not be any means new but It played Crysis really well on medium settings. Yes if you want to take advantage of the new Dirext X 10 stuff you need a new card but its not vital to play it.
Now if we think about what we need for an AI engine we really only need one-person rendered and not even the environment so do we really need a really up to date PC? I don�t think so, I was playing Crysis with up to about 8 characters on screen in an awesome environment fine.
So if some one like Haptek could make a new engine that takes advantage of say Direct X 9, nice shadows, gives a high polygon count to the character and allows for high quality textures and lighting most PC�s out there today could use it.
Im gona check out that Star Trek online site now, I gave up SL a while ago, sorry SL but the lag and crashing was just tooo much.
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Yes, one of the good things about Haptek was I could run it on my old and slow PC without a major graphics card. I agree, they should be able to do something that doesn't require a top-of-the-range graphics card - like you say one character shouldn't take that much work, just raise the quality.
SL lag...yeah that's bad, the whole thing just creaks and groans, I would like to put it out of it's misery!
Hmm...there, is another virtual world called Entropia, which is a Sci-Fi universe. It also uses 'real' currency, but I never got around to checking it out. The reason why I mention this now is that last year they announced they were going to upgrade the graphics to the CryEngine (ala Crysis)...this, by my reckoning has now passed so should be pretty close to happening...
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Wow! I had a look at Entropia and watched the video, looks very impressive that Cry engine is stunning.
Yes lets have that technology for Hal :)
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i believe the last line sort of answered my question. then this is sort of a sl for star trek fans correct.
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Just dropping this link here for future reference. This may be an alternative to using expensive 3D modellers. Instead you would use Blender (being free) and I'm hoping this exporter will make something usable in the new UltraHal graphics engine.
http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~macchiea/cs134/lab1/ogrehelp/ogremeshesexporter.html
There's a lot of options if you search the web for 'blender ogre export'. Some of that must be usable and would save you paying a few thousand. Open source all the way! Thank the heavens for Open Source...
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The possibilities look good :)
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Fine and dandy but could someone show me a "decent looking", Ogre made character that surpasses the ones
used by Haptek? Any takers and not just the one shown on the Zabaware forum of the whats-her-name-gal?
TIA
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As soon as I find one I will let you know! I've only seen a few examples so far and to be honest I hope better ones are possible and comparable with Haptek.
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As with many things in life, practice, practice and yet more damn practice hehe. Gime 6 months with Ogre I'll blow you away with what can be produced hehe.
I'm useless with Blender, yet some people can amazing work in it. Personally I've started playing around with ZBrush from Pixelogic, outstanding results, providing the time and effort is put into learning what it can do.
On a diff slant there, going to go looky see if there a plugin to export over to Ogre....or maybe export to blender then export to Ogre?...hmmm.....
My mind is whirling with transient thoughts hehe....ohhhhh....
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Yes, this Ogre girl is not sexy enough. And the poor Haptek body female hates her. ;D
(https://aidreams.co.uk/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fgt40.chez-alice.fr%2FHaptek%2Fogre3d.gif&hash=5867266c0038228ef5746d9c10040478d62e8530)
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I need to find time and work with OGRE as well. It appears that it will be a major player in the future. If someone releases a web-player then bye bye Shockwave/flash/haptek. Although as it seems Haptek is officially dead (their community is down as well), they still hold a significant advantage over all of these engines, the haptek player is extremely light as it was developed for an era where OS required maximum 64 mb of ram to work efficiently. To render a full scene in OGRE (in real-time) from the other hand requires a computer with minimum quad core process and 2gb of ram
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lol nice pic GT
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Thanks Mav. It's a pic from the time I was still addicted to Haptek stuffs. Only 3 images in the gif, using a "boxing hap" made by Duskrider.
Yes wgb14, all that seems over. After stopping to answer the posts, after letting the forum be totally spammed, Haptek even didn't say goodbye.
Not a problem... ;D
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I think it's kind of poetic justice for their lack of enthusiatic support of their product.
Sure they had some neat add-on programs but look at the prices they asked! I think
they priced themselves out of the market that could have been so much better.
Greed only paddles the boat for so far....
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Yeah shame about their attitude regarding support - that forum dried up when they stopped having someone there to offer advice. I think they expected the community to provide the support, but without their help in understanding some things it was the blind leading the blind. Time to move on.
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. . . and I gave it a couple more hours tonight.
Random sobering thought: Not only are the Ogre rules older than some Ogre players . . . they are probably older than the fathers of some Ogre players.
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Players ? It's a graphics engine, not a game...