[MUD-Dev] Speaking of Avatars

[Jon A. Lambert]

On 17 Mar 98 at 18:51, J C Lawrence wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Mar 1998 22:22:57 PST8PDT 
> Jon A Lambert<jlsysinc at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> 
> > I spent a couple of mindless minutes the other day looking at
> > Microsoft's Chat client for IRC.  
> 
> I hear that bathing is lye and nitric acid is a generally
> recommended recovery treatment for that.

How appropriate for St. Patrick's day.  If my chemistry hasn't failed 
me and if mixed carefully you be bathing in Sodium Nitrate in which 
case you'd be 'corned' or 'pickled'.  Then again it would be an 
awfully warm bath and highly dangerous if you lit up a cigar. 
<ack-sorry>
  
> > It might be of interest to some
> > graphic client developers, so I've included an attached .jpg
> > screenshot of what a session looks like.
> 
> Interesting.  Very.  Some questions (as I don't have any version of
> Windows here):
> 
>   The cartoon figures are pre-canned assemblies of body components
> (this head on that body etc)?

No. the avatars are a single component.  That is you can't mix body
parts.  Though it's a swell idea. :)

>   What controls the zoom-in/zoom-out focus I see in the various
> images?  The lower right image for instance has zoomed in on the two
> figures seen in the lower left image.

Characters are shrunk proportionately to the number of people you 
have selected from the room's guest list.  If you do not select or
direct conversation to anyone, a 'toon with just your avatar appears.
Of course everyone sees it, because its still global chat.
 
>   Similarly, what controls the body postures as seen in the upper
>   left 
> and upper right images?  Can you drag the limbs of the art deco chap
> (I presume that's you) into various postures to have that appear
> remotesly with the spin wheel below being a selection box for facial
> contortions? 

The spin wheel controls both body poses and facial expressions 
simultaneously.  You can't control them separately.  Again there's
a lot of room for implementing this better in a mud client. 

> > There where several hundred users on this particular server and
> > there was no appreciable lag over and above the normal IRC text mode
> > as all the graphics are generated from within the client.  While I
> > found the comic book aspect quite irritating after awhile, it struck
> > me as a format that may be quite suitable for a Superheroes, X-Men
> > or Anime type mud.
> 
> Ahh, can this client be used with normal IRC servers, or is it MS
> specific ala NetMeeting?

I really have no idea.  Hrrm.  It didn't seem important to check at 
the time since I have no interest in IRC otherwise.  

OTOH, Netmeeting is a real dog, very, very high-bandwidth usage.  
Simultaneous realtime video and audio are for those of the 56K+ 
connections or dedicated lines.  And even then, the video-strobe 
effect makes me queasy.          

> Did dragging the central selector also control physical posture?

Yep, at the same time as the expression.

It did strike me that the avatar image is basically like a flip page
book (or animated .gif) where the spin control simply provided an 
index into the images.  Very simple really.  

For this to work with really "personalized" avatars, there would need
to be mechanisms where someone's personal avatar was shipped up to 
the server and out to all the clients.  Perhaps as they encounter 
you.  

The protocol must be extremely light.  For instance when someone 
talks one would need only provide some tags to an avatar filename/
unique number, an index into the pose, the list of guest references 
if any, and a background number.  This is probably more compact 
than a rainbow ansi color sequence. 

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