Guild of Writers

Is there a way to convert Avatars into NPCs (kind of like Esher and Yeesha in Myst V)?

PeteC wrote:Is there a way to convert Avatars into NPCs (kind of like Esher and Yeesha in Myst V)?

Some people ware working on it but status so far:
before open source, real world implementation is rather out of reach.

OHB's OHBot is the closest so far, he's doing it officially with Cyan permission, and at some point he's going to give all he's learned to us... eventually

Do you mean convert a playable avatar model into something that can just be animated? Yes, that can be done. But Uru doesn't have the facilities to do much here, unfortunately.

Do you mean just have a bot control a regular avatar? That's possible, but perhaps a bad idea. They are a novelty which leaves you implicitly less immersed in the game than when every avatar you saw was an actual person. *wonders if there will be an OHBot flamewar here :D*

ddb174 wrote:Do you mean convert a playable avatar model into something that can just be animated? Yes, that can be done. But Uru doesn't have the facilities to do much here, unfortunately.

Do you mean just have a bot control a regular avatar? That's possible, but perhaps a bad idea. They are a novelty which leaves you implicitly less immersed in the game than when every avatar you saw was an actual person. *wonders if there will be an OHBot flamewar here *

Doubt it. I also disagree with you that a bot is any less immersive than an NPC. I think that if you program and write the character for a bot just in the right way, it could be used to immerse a player into a story far more than an NPC.

I didn't mean to suggest that NPCs were immersive ;) I was just saying that if one expects normal avatars to be real people, then once that expectation is let down, you've lost some immersion. Depending on who you are, you might not even care about that, and instead prefer that there is something, *anything* to take away the tedium of the game. So whether people like bots or not will vary from person to person. That's why it was only *perhaps* a bad idea.

I see what you're saying. However the argument applies to anything in life. Some people like to play Uru and some don't. Some people want immersion, some want just gadgets and puzzles. You can't please everyone and trying to would only lead to frustration.

So I think that Uru (in an open source condition) could actually please more people with multiple shards that all have a different flavor. However Uru would have to progress fully into open source for that to happen.

What I meant, was like Yeesha and Esher from Myst V. Those were pre-programmed animations (the 3D equivalent to a movie). Has anyone done such a a thing and is it possible to have such characters respond to PC actions (such as having them turn to face PC as he/she moves around)?

Also, where can I get a copy of the avatar to modify into NPC/As?

I don't think anyone besides Cyan has made an NPC animation work. It looks like you will be pioneering. I don't think you will learn more from studying the Yeesha Avatar and animation than anything else.