This tutorial will teach you how to create a new character using NPCEditor. The character created in this example will greet the player and then prepare them a cake using a series of yes or no questions. This is the tutorial character's dialog graph:
NPCEditor stores data in the p-list format, similar to XML. These files contain the questions and answers for the character, as well as the links between them. There is also an accounts plist required to connect a character to other modules, which is stored in %AppData%\Roaming\NPCEditor\people\
run.bat
in your NPCEditor install, or from the Toolkit, run the Virtual Human Toolkit Launcher and expand the '<< Advanced
' options, then click 'Launch
' in the NPCEditor row in the 'Agents
' section.Save files automatically if application is idle for 15 seconds.
"File->New
' to create a new plist. Save it as 'cake.plist
'.Inside cake.plist
, select the People tab and create a new person named 'cake vendor
'.This person will handle the initial greeting exchange.
A note on "People" in NPCEditor
Make sure you set both 'first name' and 'last name' for your person. If your person/domain's name is just one word, you can set the last name or the first name to be a space or you can split the word into 2 parts, one for the first name and the other for the last name, such as 'CakeVendor
' or 'Cake Vendor
'
After creating a new example and saving the plist, to make it load automatically every time the NPCEditor runs, you'll need to edit the config for theVirtual Human Toolkit launcher. Editing the NPCEditor launch script that in svn_vhtoolkit/trunk/tools/launch-scripts/run-toolkit-npceditor.bat
and then re-compile vhtoolkit.sln, or, i
f you want to make this change without having to re-compile, edit the file bin/launcher-scripts/run-toolkit-npceditor.bat
.
In that script change the pointer from the default plist file to your new plist file. Also set the option 'Connect at startup' in the 'People' tab for the person/domain associated with the Smartbody connection.
The tossing to a new domain is decided in the dialog manager script (that can be seen in the dialog manager tab).
The default script tosses after the character has finished saying the utterance (finished=both sound and animation are done, sometime these can be out of sync).
This may cause problems when the user doesn't wait for the character to finish its utterance before submitting the next user's utterance (because the domain will not be yet correctly set when the new user's utterance comes in).
To modify the default behavior and move the tossing from the end of the utterance to the beginning of the utterance, move the two selected lines from the method npcBehavior_done
to the method npcBehavior_begin
as displayed in the following image:
To debug the dialog manager script one can add logging instructions. To do that one has to add this import: import com.leuski.af.Application;
and use the following expression to log something: Application.getLogger().warning(a.toString());
where a
is the object we want to print in the log.
The log is saved in $HOME/AppData/Local/Temp/edu.usc.ict.npc.editor.EditorMain.0
If you are unsure on the location of the log file, you can use tools like Process Explorer.
An additional way to debug it is by using the debugging capabilities of an IDE. With IntelliJ is easy to import the project directly from the source checked out of the svn repository. It figures out most of the dependencies (but not all). Just try to recompile all projects, and resolve one by one the errors the compile gets (that are unresolved symbol errors) by including in the dependencies of the project, the module that implements the symbols (classes) unresolved.
The main
method to run to get the NPCEditor is the one in the class trunk\core\NPCEditor\editor\src\java\edu\usc\ict\npc\editor\EditorMain.java
IntelliJ can also debug Groovy together with Java (the dialog manager script is written in Groovy).
To recompile NPCEditor just run ant
from the directory trunk\core\NPCEditor
If you use this way to debug NPCEditor, you may want to disable the NPCEditor row in the launcher so that only the instance started from IntelliJ is present.
Another way to handle state changes is by keeping track of the state in the dialog manager script.
When the user says or types something, the classifier receives it and returns the list of most appropriate answers.
This list is what the expression List <Map<String,Object>> answers = engine.search(global.domainName, event)
;
returns (near the top of the method public boolean vrSpeech_asr_complete(Event event)
. Each answer is an object of form Map<String,Object
.
Within the script itself, one can keep a state variable, then the state can be changed based on the list returned by the classifier (i.e. answers
) and a particular reply can be sent to the virtual agent.
To send a particular reply, we can change the value associated with the key 'ID' of the element in answers
that we want to send to the virtual agent for speech production and animation.
Each answer in the 'Utterances' tab in the NCPEditor has an 'External ID' column. So, to send the utterance we want, just get it's ID (that is the value of the 'External ID' column, this should have be manually stored in the state variable), then pick one of the objects in answers
, change the value associated with the key 'ID' to the 'External ID' selected and send the modified object using the send
method.