Skeletally animated objects / NPCs

A lot of people have been begging for "av-as-a-prim" functionality.
I understand that the av meshes would be a strain on the client and the agent collision masks would be a strain on the server.
Would it be easier for LL to let us have something like an "avatar skeleton", that was or could be made invisible so as not to stress the renderer, not necessarily customizable through appearance mode sliders, phantom so it would be easier on the physics engine, BUT capable of playing BVH animations and having objects attached to it?
You want to see more games, we want to make believable NPCs.
Yes, I know, you have bugs to fix and a physics engine to port and a new permissions system and all that stuff...

I've been doing something like this with phantom, physical prims and llMoveToTarget/llRotLookAt. A "feature" would likely take a bit of coding for the existing prim engine, so it seemed convenient at the time.

I've debated releasing the code (as it uses Listeners, currently), but if you'd like to run over sometime and have a look, Eggy, I'd be glad to show you.

Looks like another fan of Eggeh!

Sure Jeffrey I would love to take a look at your stuff.
A long time ago I was involved with a project to make a keyframe animator thingy... though I think it used ll[Get|Set][Pos|Rot] instead of physical stuff.
The thing is, it takes a shitload of time to achieve anything. Not user-friendly enough for a production environment.

What I'm asking for is:
Drag and drop a folder with attachments onto an "avatar skeleton".
Drag and drop one or more BVH animations onto the same.
Drag and drop a simple animation script.
Touch the "avatar skeleton", and you're good to go.

I'd be interested in seeing what you've got, Jeffrey, if you are willing to share, but I would really like what Eggy is suggesting. I think it's a good compromise in the "we want NPCs" vs. "no laggy robot avs" debate. Even if most of the resulting NPCs will look like wooden marionettes on strings.

neko

What I have currently is a simple "virtual joints" script based on offset vectors and rotations that will work at all angles, fluidly. I'd be glad to show that later (roughly 9PM EST). BVH/simple animation scripts were on the menu a week ago, but I got buried in other priorities before I got to it. This we can discuss; I need to look at it.

Some problems I'll lay out on the table while I'm preoccupied with my Night Classes for the evening - I brainstormed these last week:

- Joint Generation (how does one generate/regenerate joints of a "bot?"
- Joint Awareness (do joints need to be aware of one another or can they be based on a central object, alone?)
- Location Awareness (how do joints figure out where the central "brain" is? A listener? A key value on a timer? RPC channels?)
- Script Overhead (what will this do to a sim? I put this on the backburner for fear of this)
- User-Friendliness (how user friendly can this be? Will it be hard to maintain simplicity?)

Good to know there are people interested.