Saturday, January 8, 2011

100 npc bots in opensim

I need NPC bots as greeters, information providers, and quest givers. NPC bots are useful to reduce the loneliness of an empty virtual world (which is quite common).  I was able to spawn 100 server side bots in OpenSimulator ver. 0.6.9 following Kenneth Rougeau's instructions. I could have gone higher but the server was getting laggy. My problem with this approach is that I would have to roll back my sim from 0.7.0.2 wherein the NPCModule is broken.

There are 104 avatars in this image, 3 failed to rezz and remain clouds
With respect to my current Philippine History game project, I could really use them as soldiers, shopkeepers, teachers, etc.  I was able to use Radegast's aiml plugin for a chatbot but the resources needed for running multiple instances of Radegast is larger than a server side NPC bot. I can also spawn multiple bots using a single instance of Radegast by using File->New window. And then logging in a new avatar as shown in the following screenshot.


This means I'm keeping multiple Radegast viewers open. Another drawback of this approach is that the two bots in the screenshot share the same aiml brain.  One could use a new brain by switching users in your computer, then running a Radegast viewer there. But then you'll have new xwindows instances and all the overhead of maintaining another account running in the desktop.

Creating a prim mannequin results in an ugly mannequin due to low level LOD at a distance, and the ceiling of 1024 verts per sculpty prim.

There's got to be a better solution out there, or hopefully someone will fix 0.7.x.x OpenSim's NPC Module.

5 comments:

DB said...

Yes there is a solution. It's aurora-sim, the branch of opensim which was spun off by some of the imprudence developers. It has a fully functional NPC system built into it and the original code was 0.7.

matangdilis said...

Thanks DB. I was looking for such information. I'll try to test it later on. I wish the persistence of attachments will be solved soon.

Bodzette said...

The persistence of attachments has been solved in Aurora and the NPC code is much further developed. You should check it out.

Kenneth Rougeau said...

matangdilis:
I thought you'd like to know that the OpenSim NPC code has been revamped & is now working in version 0.7.2 RC1, which was made available yesterday. I've only done a couple of preliminary tests, but it seems to be working fine! I'm looking forward to lashing AIML back into the mix and finally getting my experiments going again :)

matangdilis said...

W00t! Thanks for the update Kenneth.

 
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