alice capability

hello for all
i donot speak english very well but i will write good

1-iam working in a project to design character and animation it on alice
but i want to animation it from out the alice program can i do that?and how?

I'm not too sure exactly what you want to do.

My first suggestion would be to go through the Alice tutorials and see if they show you how to do what you want.

If you just want to animate objects already in Alice, that's pretty easy.

If you want to create your own character - that's pretty hard in Alice. There are some 2D programs that can do that and aren't very difficult - I can suggest one if you can give me some more detail about what you are trying to do.

Hope you are successful in what you want to do.

thanks for replay
iam so soory because i can not speak english very well but i will explain what i need?
i have a project "multimodel interface to a spoken dialogue system"
the character already created.
the input for my project : text and i will analysis this text and i want animate the character
expressions form the programming languages sush as(java) , can i pass code from programming languages
to alice to animate character accordingly the input text?
Can i used API functions with alice?
the output : speech text and character animation (face expressions)
i hope to understand that and help me

If I understand what you want to do correctly, that's going to be fairly hard in Alice. First, if you already have your character created, it isn't going to be very easy to get it into Alice. Second, I don't think any of the Alice characters have much, if anything, in the way of mouth animation (I'll check a bit further, though - I want to do something there myself).

Finally, with this version of Alice, you can't use most of the Java functions directly - see the thread http://www.alice.org/community/showt...p?t=353&page=2 , especially Gabe's comments - do read both pages of the thread.

One useful URL - you can get a .wav file of a short text spoken by one of several speakers at http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php . You could use this with a series of 2D images presented on a billboard (see the code with the FireAnim in the "Special Effects" Gallery).

There is also a freeware program, "Tales Animator" ( http://www.dollysoft.com/index.htm ) that has some tools to do a similar type of 2D animation and also has an interface to the Microsoft text-to-speech engine.

Hope this is some help for what you want to do. If any of this looks like something you may want to follow further, let me know and I'll see if there is anything else I might contribute. (Also would be interested in anyone else's comments! ) As I said earlier, this is an area of interest of mine, although it's fairly low priority right now.

iam search about away to communication between alice and
any other programming language or even the OS

so (can i simulate mouse events or keyboard events on alice?)

Just wanted to add my five pence to this discussion...
I am also trying to get something like face expressions, because for doing little films (machinima would be to big a word for this project ) this is exactly what I need, too.

Actually, the only way to do this I could think of (and where I will try to work on) is to take the texture animation path, as most models don't have facial parts in their models. So what could work is to take the texture of the model, copy it and change the face expressions on it, recompile the a2c file and write the asisting methods. Any proposals for a shortcut here?
The other way round was to take a model with defined subparts for mouth, eys and so on and import it into Alice. Due to the limitations of import function I would consider this the hard way, though the results might be more promissing for machinima (gna, I used the m-word , filmmaking, cartoon, etc.)

BTW given the limitations of the alice graphics-engine I was thinking about turning onto Panda or somethnig, but the Alice interface and the high number of prebuilt models is too attracting to me, so I think I will stay a while with Alice


Addendum:

OK, it is done. I added a second texture to Mary and the method talk, wich exchanges the two textures periodically. The texture exchange was done the following way
1. rename mary.a2c to mary.zip and unzip into its folder structure
2. copy the folder skin and rename the copy to lets say skin2
3. in skin2 change the image.png apropriatly (I change the shape of the mouth)
4. Add skin2 in the elementdata.xml of the main folder of mary
4a) you have to add skin2 in the children section and
4b) you have to add skin2 in the texturemaps section
5. save it back
6. zip the whole structre back into one zip file
7. rename the zip to a2c

Now you can change the skintexture of the model in Alice as you like it.
OK Guys, hope this helps, I add my Mary in the attachment and remember:
NO NUDE PATCHES (at least in class)

Almost hate to mention this after the work you have done - and maybe you have added something over this approach that isn't obvious at first glance - but if you haven't changed the texture size, you can just import the new skin for the object like any other texture in Alice. (See the earlier post I did on a Zombie skin.)

Okok,

this is clearly a case of READ THE F.ING MANUAL FIRST.
Sorry for that, I'm just to much into doing things the hard way.
Thx Jim for bringing me back to ground.
But it was a good exercise anyway, wasn't it...

Originally Posted by alice_love

iam search about away to communication between alice and
any other programming language or even the OS

so (can i simulate mouse events or keyboard events on alice?)

any help for this question please