Non Playable Character

I'm not so familiar with Second Life but I want to make a booth with a non playable character behind the desk that gives some info/feedback when clicked upon.

Can someone point me to some info on how to do this ?

Can you make a non-playable character ?
How do you script it ?

Thanks.

You can make anything you want within the limits of your building skills.

Take a good long look at the wikki and browse the script library and Examples

Also try searching this forum.

Depends exactly what type of interaction you want to be able to have with the booth.
A touch event can be used to trigger a dialog based interaction or hand out notecards or fire up an internet browser with a url. The decision is yours...

If you have a more specific question we can give more specific answers

But can have a non-playable character/ avatar behind the booth that stays in SL forever and hands out info ?

I can't seems to find anything about this in the manuals ? Is this possible ?

I have seen mannequins (sp?) like store window dummy in various places, some full 3D, some just an object plane with a texture pasted on it. You will also see some of these in some shops (as display) all you would need then is a touch script for the info

You can build anything you like, and yes it will stay put on your land until deleted.
How realistic / AV looking you make it is up to you. At its simplist it could just be a single textured box/prim, at its most complex a multi prim object photo tetxured to look like an avatar. Liek I said the decision is yours...

But you can't make a clone of your SL character and script some behavior for it and let it act as a bot that stays in SL when you're not online ?

I guess you can model an avatar just as you model any other prop in SL and attach some scripts/behavior to it ... but it would be much easier just to duplicate you're avatar.

Simple answer no.
Slightly longer answer yes.
A number of places use dummy avatars as greeters, by either using a alternate account that is permanently logged on or by building a model using the SL tools.

Yeah Gunther, just cause I'm not sure if anyone answered your core question.

At this time, there are no NPC avatars. Every single avatar you see is a person sitting behind a computer somewhere.

Now that is 99% true. Recently there has been a lot of controversy over CopyBot, which is an open-source program that connects to the SL servers and copies stuff. I bring this up because it is the result of code from the open-source libsecondlife project. They created the core part of the copybot program as a demo until some other folks took their code and created CopyBot, the much maligned program available out there now.

LibSL has also made a lot of progress in creating an open-source Second Life client. In a recent video from New World Notes w/ Wagner James Au, they demonstrated not only CopyBot, but another program that logs in avatars running from a server.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TFGFtRizn0

NWN article: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/engines_of_creation/index.html

NOTE: I don't work for LibSL, however I am supportive of their open-source work and the open-source community in general. CopyBot was an unavoidable artifact arising from the very nature of Second Life. SL is moving towards a more and more open platform. Eventually someone would have created something like CopyBot. At least in this case, it was from an open-source project that lets anyone interested to review the code and will let Linden Labs make what corrections to the protocol as they deem necessary.

What you are describing is a greeter bot. You can buy them on slexchange from free to $200L.
If you want to script your own you would use a sensor or collision detection with a phantom object to detect when someone is near and then use either a give inventory to give either/or notecards, landmarks etc.
You might want to look at chatbots also if you want more interactivity.

A free sample script can be found at:
http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=21056