Avatar as prim

I know this sounds like a strange request, but I would like to see the ability to create a non-player controlled avatar in the world the way we create objects. This would be useful for creating statues, mannequins, etc... if we could apply clothing and textures to them. Since the engine already supports the rendering of avatars in all their glory it would seem there could be some hope that a feature like this could be added. It would also open up some creative possibilities, since it is very difficult to make the human shape using prims.

I have to agree, though along with it I would like basic ai control, walk to point X, Say Y, play anim I etc. Basic Daemons would be nice, I would love to add a librarian to the library and have them offer a guided tour or point out where things are.

No doubt this is a miniature pandora's box but at the same time this could be an amazing tool.

-Neil

Since avatars are the most geometry intense objects in SL, wouldn't this cause nasty lag? Maybe if you taxed the hell out of them it would help, like say, $5,000 per week. But then, the usefulness just went out the window.

Yikes! No NPCs please.

Why not Wensday? Isn't a talking prim an NPC in effect?

jabut... it's easy to tell that a prim is not a person.

Ha! fooled you, I'm a prim

Just create some way so people can tell that it's a scripted robot, not a real avatar. Why doesn't someone just create some animatronics in SL?

You know better than to ask that by now james
(Re: Animitronics)

That would be SO awesome.. but..

The potential for abuse would be extremely high.. imagine a script that spawned in 50 or more AV prims, lagging any onlookers computer to a crawwwwl

That could be easily be solved by not allowing them to be created via script. Hell, they don't even have to be full avatars - they could just allow us to put clothing on them that would approximate how they would look on an average avatar .

I could really do with being able to create NPC-like stuff. Doesnt have to include the actual Av model (though that'd definitely be a bonus), but would at least like to be able to control it like an Avatar.

Foward, backward, jump

I'd like to create some monsters and stuff. Physical/non-physical/vehicles each have problems for this (I think?):
- vehicles -> laggy -> ruled out from start
- physical -> bitch to control, tendency to fall-over..., friction just doesn't work the same as people walking... and if you create a tiny, tiny object on the ground it gets stuck!
- non-physical -> not very easy to detect walls and stuff

Summary: would be very nice to have an npc/monster object type

ZHugh

Bumping this fine old vintage thread as one of many requesting NPCs. Cast a vote for it here:

http://secondlife.com/vote/get_feature.php?get_id=201

neko

Response from Cory's town hall:

Nekokami Dragonfly: Is SL more likely to get scriptable avatars for NPCs or building tools to create animals, monsters, etc?

Cory Linden: There are some tradeoffs here. Historically, an avatar == a human, but there have been requests to change that. The tricky part is that rendering skinned avatars with big textures is relatively expensive, so we'd have to limit NPC choices in some way.
Cory Linden: The other direction would be to enable interesting jointed, animated, and/or skinned creations via the building tools. My personal desire is to head in the latter direction, but it would take more development work than just scripting avatars.
Cory Linden: Neither in the current schedule for either 1.7 or 1.8.

1.7 is supposed to be "2-3 months" away. I have no idea about 1.8. But I imagine if people voted heavily for this or a related proposal (e.g. the animated prims) it could still land in either schedule.

neko

I've been participating in some discussions about beta testing for 1.7. It occurs to me that if we had scriptable avatars (NPCs) we could create automated load testing suites that could catch a chunk of the trouble before the paying customers have to go on and try to lag the preview grid to death. Just make a whole ton of NPCs that would wander around, click on things, buy things, babble at each other, run animations, fly vehicles across sim boundaries, etc., and record errors, crash results, and other statistics. It wouldn't replace the need for human testing, of course, but for load testing and repetitive testing of features known to have been fragile in the past, it could be extremely helpful.

In fact, I think this is probably the best justification yet for having scriptable avatars. Even if they are limited to the preview grid at first.

neko

This just sounds like a lag inducing greefing tool to me. Nope I do not like it.

You want something like this build a guy make him chat and just move him around with the controls. I have done it with the help of a scripting buddy. I built it he gave it life.