Avatar NPCs

LOL - C'mon, you have to have seen the 1970's Katherine Ross/Tina Louise rendition! It's only been on the late late late movie of the week a billion times.

I think NPC stands for N-on P-laying C-haracter

Ciao!

Right, "NPC" comes from table-top RPGs like Paranoia or Dungeons and Dragons. SL is an MMO, maybe an MMOG, but definitely not an MMORPG, Darklife notwithstanding.

In SL, one could concievably use the avatar-as-prim idea to create NPCs for games, though.

As for... ruining the movie...? Heh. Even the remake's website says as much. You seriously haven't heard of the original? Or what it's about?

That's like not knowing that Darth Vader is Luke's father, or what "Rosebud" meant... or where 'Soylent Green' comes from. It's pretty deeply ingrained in our popular culture.

He is, and Leia's his sister.
The sled.
It's people.

By the way, Bruce Willis was dead the whole time.

And Brad Pitt is Edward Norton's split personality.

STOP HIJACKING MY THREAD >_0

This is the feature I would most like to see in sl. The idea of NPCs wandering about and conversing with people is great - I can't wait to start programming my butler.

In another virtual world there was an opportunity to program (in a very primitive way) a pet which had its own avatar. I most enjoyed programming a buddha figure, which, depending on what was said to it, would come out with portentous and meaningless statements like: "Nothing is what it seems, save that which seems to be what it is not."

This is something that could make sl even more amusing and entertaining, and it's something I would really like to see.

Ker-frigginomgwtfLAWLLAWLLAWLbump!

i'm thinking this would be a cool thing to have for something even as simple as having a store-demo dummy wearing the clothes/attatchments you've made. heck, everything else in all of second life already treats avatars as a single prim. dummy av's would be a neat addition.

There are already too many avatars in world who'd fail a Turin test. We want to make more deliberately??

Siobhan,

Scriptable NPCs, huh? That idea with the custom animations implimented would be sweet... 1.5 you say?

Chance Small starts building a whore house.

I vote for the Voigt-Kampf test to be performed as a right click gesture on any avatar!

Seriously...maybe I'm missing something, but aside from acting as clothing models and demonstrating animations (which would be cool) what is the point of NPCs? It seems like it would be a big server drain to have AI people wandering around. I like the fact that everyone I run into is a real person. Can someone please enlighten me as to the uses of such a Replicant?

for one, they could be used as a possible combat npc. like, well, rememer darkwood? the bosses coulda been npc dummies.

Can we retire any that pass (or fail? whatever)?

or do we need to call Ryen for that?

Bumping this topic in light of the Town Hall and the mentioning.

NPC's are nicer for interaction, talking to prims kinda sucks. Also you can use them for maniquins. Potentialy you could also use them to work on attachments for yourself if NPC's are done right, imagine having an NPC loaded with all your settings, then you could use it to build attachments on (this is null if we could STOP THE BREATHING ANIMATION). You could also do mechina with better control than using real avatars. Theres alot of possibilities that are inventive that I could think up.

I think the following would help in distinguishing an NPC from an avatar:

- Some kind of hue around them (simular to when you select an object, and it should be toggable for those of us who don't want/need it).

- Differently colored text in chat (common sense would make it just show up as regular object text, i.e. green text with the name of the NPC)

- Either do not show up on mini-map, or show up as some other indicator.

- If name must be present over NPC's head (I don't think it should be), could be different color than normal avatar's as well as having NPC as the last name, i.e. "Bob NPC" or, have NPC at the end of the name, i.e. "Bob Spade (NPC)" (this would make making a title with (NPC) as it, null).

- NPC Objects would be selectable as are regular objects (would bring up the same pie menu regular objects do when right clicking them).

The solution to the problem kind of breaks the point itself. The point of NPC's to me, is to be able to create a user like interactable object, as well as it being as normal-avatar looking as possible for other projects (such as attachment building, pictures, etc.). I personaly would not have a name above the NPC objects head, because I think it should be treated like an object in this aspect, this would also be a tip off to new users that its an NPC (lack of name above head).

To better associate newbies with NPC's, I would have an NPC present on orientation island that explains the difference between an NPC and a real player, i.e. "Hello! Welcome to Second Life! I will be your guide on Orientation Island. I however am not a real user, you can tell this by the aura around me, NPC's in SL have this aura, users do not." or something simular.

What features I'd like to see NPC objects be able to do:

- Have animations effect them as they would an avatar and animations to be loaded onto them via script.

- Allow scripts to be run within them, like a regular object, NPC objects would have their own inventory that could house various items.

- Able to load shapes, either by Ctrl+Drag+Drop, or by having a script activate the shape in some form.

- Able to switch clothing via script or Ctrl+Drag+Drop, like droping a image onto a prim that allows others to drop images onto its face, the NPC object would auto load the clothing to whatever body part it belongs.

- Objects should be able to be linked, or in some way attached to them as you can with your own avatar.

Idealy the NPC object would have normal object properties (object name, description, inventory, maybe even material and shinyness) as well as the properties our avatars have.

Paying for them? Maybe. But I think it should work like the former object taxes work, once you delete or take the NPC object into your inventory you get the money back.

Say maybe an initial 100$L fee for creation, and a 100$L fee weekly for each NPC object you have in world.

The thinking behind this is to prevent people from making a sim full of NPC Objects with 250 attachments at each attachment point.

The other possibility would be to limit the amount of NPC objects a person can have (say 5 in world at a time for each avatar), this however would kind of suck, as well as allow for alt accounts to potentialy have more. You could restrict NPC objects a person can have in a sim, but again, same issue.

Unfortantly paying for NPC objects seems the best to reduce lag possibilities.

I think theres a large ammount of possibilities for NPC objects and I'd love to see them in world. I do and at the same time don't think there needs to be a way to distinguish them from real people, stupid people will always be stupid no matter what you try to do to explain things to them, may sound harsh, but its true.

I am however more than willing to accept any distinguishments that LL feels is needed if it means we get to use NPC objects.

I do think its rediculous though to not have NPC's (with or without distinguishment) based on the concept of "This object is a living person no matter what." (in regard to avatar meshes), this is close minded thinking that is not typical of LL. People have and will eventualy make more bot avatars using their own accounts in the future, which to me would be even more confusing than an NPC Object. Using prims as NPC's is also an annoying limitation that is just ugly in practice (exceptions being robots which can be pulled off).

Siobhan,

I've failed my Turing test five times running. But they tell me I can take it again next year.

But. I think the rendering cost is'nt worth it. Seems like when they improved avatar rendering 30% 2-3 patches ago, its gotten alot worse for me. So yeah, that would make even empty sims unplayable for me too, lol.
-- wishes we were closer to the new rendering system.

This sort of thing would make SL that much better for me. Other than making it even closer to the Metaverse with daemons, it would allow for much more interactive and self sufficient environments. Hopefully this feature is not too far into the future, I have been hoping for it for over a year.

Please...

and not only bots to run games, guides, etc, but also as models for clothing etc!

Hell, even ACTIVEWORLDS has this! Circa 1995 technology!

Cool! I had no idea. I made an alt for a friend that comes over quite a while ago. I just took my first picture of the two of us together.



Yup, pretty darn slow.

NPCs AS INTERFACES FOR E.G. DATABASES
Wen Nomad mentioned the Metaverse - you remember the bibliothecary (the data base terminal as an NPC) from Snow Crash?

That whole economy thing in SL makes me think that SL is not only just a game, but intended as a test version of a Metaverse where - in the future - you will be anything you can do in the Web by now.
You can be gaming, and you can live your fantasies, you can trade, you can attend and give classes and you can search databases. Knowledge and experiencing RL things one could but you yourself cannot (e.g. because you cannot travel to Egypt for whatever reasons) are a niche in a VR.

NON-HUMAN NPCs
I would like to extend the humanoid NPC in the direction of the animated pet. Since I first heard of SL, I was more or less seriously thinking of a ultra-large-scale project in which - if the economy actually works on a long term - I would even invest a lot of money.
But they would need SL to extend animation capacities beyond physics and particles and would cover all kinds of animal and fantasy-figure animation, perhaps even crowd simulation.

You could extend SL to more than just building and doing simple games, you could get a 16 sims x 16 sims island and stage the battle of Waterloo for a history lesson.

Yeah! That'd be really cool if we had some animal meshes as well, I'm sure D&D Dogs would love to be able to do that!

You could have dogs that rivaled There's, and expand it to other animals, like riding around on a chocobo!

I could get a *real* cabbit

I'm all for it, I would like a few NPCs for a few projects I'm working on. I've created several Belldandy figures and they are on the prim heavy side with a more advanced version being over 100+ prims.

I'd like to let them loose on my land, but the number I want on my land far surpasses the amount of prims my land can support. I know it's not much to compare by but Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies allowed players to place vendors in their houses.

So what ever happened with this idea? No word from the Lindens, huh?