[Freddy]

Welcome to the forum Datahopa it's great to see you here   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.

[Dante]

Ahhhh, Homeworld! the basis of Game Swarm AI!

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...

[Data]

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 

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.

[Freddy]

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...

[Data]

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 

[ALADYBLOND]

i believe the last line sort of answered my question. then this is sort of a sl for star trek fans correct.

[Freddy]

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...

[Maviarab]

The possibilities look good

[Art]

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

[Freddy]

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.

[Maviarab]

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....

[GT40]

Yes, this Ogre girl is not sexy enough. And the poor Haptek body female hates her.

[wgb14]

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

[Maviarab]

lol nice pic GT

[GT40]

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...