Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Artificial People!

Linden Lab CEO CEO Rodvik Humble posted this on the official blog yesterday: "Over the next few months (with testing most likely starting in December), we will be rolling out a series of more advanced features. These will make the creation of artificial life and artificial people much smoother" (Web).

Maybe my wish to have a true Meeroo pet -- one that will follow and interact with me much like a Real Life pet -- will come true. Sure, I can attach one of the lithe buggers to me but eventually they want to be put back down. Or I can sit with them, but they bounce about pointlessly. Having one as a companion would be cool.

How about a "human" guide? The Isle of Lesbos has Elspeth, a pseudo-bot from XD Fusion that greets arrivals, offers gifts, and takes comments. If I had the resources, I could get a more sophisticated chat bot (the dear, departed Mysteria region used one), but like Elspeth, she'd remain in one place. A moving chat bot could lead visitors to near by destinations like the dance area. Despite signs, arrows, chat directions, and more, folks still seem to get lost. If they could follow a person, they are less likely to get lost (I say "less likely" because even when I lean folks around, they sometimes get lost).

I really look forward to seeing this feature. A few builds I've seen -- like a venue that used a bot for the boatman on The River Styx and bots in a torture area in Tartarus -- have used bots to enhance the role play, but I bet advanced forms would be even more fantastic.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

They've added a new command already over on the beta grid to allow you to move a prim to various places and pause there, then move to a new place, without using physics. It will reduce code slightly for some applications, and may make for less lag in some circumstances, since physica takes up a lot of resources.

Unfortunately, it does not trigger any events yet when it reaches various points, so there is no way to get it to point an animal anywhere or trigger any actions when it gets there or along the way other than using timers. From what I've seen, it will make it easier and smoother to move things about, but its pretty useless so far when it comes to making it do anything else.

Uccie Poultry said...

Thanks, Ferd! That's good to know. Right away I think it could be used to make the YavaPod tour system I bought work more smoothly. I thought about using the cars in my haunted house this year, but couldn't do so reliably and with smooth motion. Other automated vehicles could benefit, too.