Vostopia Avatar System

well for now i want to use those avatars as models for a tech Demo before i deciede wha models i want for the final game besides my RPG uses a turned based battle system

 

i keep getting this problem
assets/vostopia/dressingroom/scripts/misc/VUIDragPanel.cs(13,28): error CS0246: The type or namespace name `IgnoreTimeScale' could not be found

 

@cynel, do you have NGUI imported in your project? At the moment, NGUI (evaluation or commercial versions both work) is required for the avatar system to compile.

 

i cant afford ngui

 

By popular demand we are now working hard on a version that is not dependent on NGUI. We will keep you all up to date on this thread.

 

Hi, I get this error when trying to play Vostopia:

Assets/vostopia/dressingroom/scripts/misc/VUIDragPanel.cs(13,28): error CS0246: The type or namespace name `IgnoreTimeScale' could not be found. Are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?

What am I missing ?

Thanks

 

thank you thank you thank you

 

@Dawin, see post above. You are missing NGUI in your project. If you haven't bought NGUI, you can test it out using the free version of NGUI (http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/124032-NGUI-Free-Edition), or, as Bjarne said above, you can wait a few days and we'll make a basic version of the avatar system that is not dependent on any third party addons.

 

Hi

this looks very promising!

Will test it out later with my Photon account.

I just need to add dressing room_default and BootScene and deploy as webplayer and it will work? That Simple?

R

 

@reset, there aren't buttons hooked up to load the dressingroom in the photon example. However, you could add that yourself. The current example expects BootScene, MenuScene, GameScene and WhiteBox to all be in your build settings.

Make sure you have downloaded the 1.16 version of the the photon demo before you proceed though. There was a bug in versions 1.14 and 1.15 that prevented webplayer builds to connect to the vostopia servers.

Come to think of it, the dressingroom should definitely be hooked up in that example. I'll see if I can add it later today.

 

Thanks Kvante

Yeah I was hoping to test it with a bunch of people to see how it all worked out. Was thinking it would start with dressing room and move to game scene?

Will muck around with it now and see if I can work it out

R

 

Hi

Yeah I am not sure what is happening. According to your docs this should run in the Unity editor?

I click on Boot Scene and your green avatar menu pops up and I click on 'I dont wish to be remembered', Photon then loads, create room, game scene,
then loading avatar comes up (yet I have not created one yet) then error:


SecurityException: Reading from the screen is not allowed when you have used a downloaded texture without proper crossdomain.xml authorization
UnityEngine.Texture2D.ReadPixels (Rect source, Int32 destX, Int32 destY) (at C:/BuildAgent/work/d9c061b1c154f5ae/Runtime/ExportGenerated/Editor/Graphics.cs:737)
AvatarItemTextureStamper+<StampGPU>d__42.MoveNext ()
AvatarItemTextureStamper+<StampTexturesGPU>d__39.MoveNext ()
AvatarItemTextureStamper+<StampAllTextures>d__5.MoveNext ()
AvatarController+<AssembleAvatarAssets>d__0.MoveNext ()

R

 

@reset, are you running with the evaluation version of ngui? If so, it downloads the watermark image from a server that does not supply crossdomain.xml. We are using readpixels to do texture stamping on the GPU and because of the security model in Unity you'll get problems with the webplayer (and the editor in webplayer mode).

The easiest work around is to choose the stand alone build target instead of webplayer.

Another work around is to find the AvatarController instances in your scenes and disable "CombineMeshes" as well as setting "StampMethod" to "LayeredMaterials". This will disable texture stamping alltogether and therefore it should not cause any security exceptions.

I should note that disabling CombineMeshes and texture stamping reduces the rendering performance of the avatars considerably. You'll get 50-100 draw calls per avatar (compared to 1-4 draw calls for combined meshes), depending on outfit and the shaders are a bit more complicated. It works fine for a few characters, but if you have lots of characters on screen at the same time you might notice performance hits.

 

Hi Kvante

thanks for your reply.

So does this work with the web player - as I have developed my work for the web player - not stand alone.

Or are you saying that I need to buy the full version of NGUI for it to work?'

thanks
R

 

I hope you guys can find a way to do this without NGUI

 

Hi Guys,

I've ported the authentication interface to OnGUI, so it should be possible to load the avatars even if you don't have access to NGUI. It's working pretty well, but there's a few more things I am going to do to it before I'm pushing it to the asset store. I've put up a pre-release build on https://dl.dropbox.com/u/195704/Vostopia/vostopia_basic_1.16.4.unitypackage though, and would love some feedback on what you think.

We currently don't have a plan for porting the dressingroom/shop ui to OnGUI, so that will be separated into it's own package in order to completely separate the basic vostopia package from NGUI.

Enjoy! And as always, I'd love to hear what you think of the avatar system, and what you're using it for.

 

Last night, we were unfortunately affected by an outage on godaddy's dns service. This made vostopia.com and all affected services unavailable due to lack of dns lookups.

I'm _really_ sorry about the problems this may have caused, and to prevent this from happening again, I've moved the dns hosting of vostopia.com to amazon's route53 service, which is far more reliable and resilient to attacks.

 

HI Kvante

is this all running ok now?

I tried to export the build (Vostopia/Photon) to a web player and I am get compile errors.

So the break down of Vostopia/Photon would:

- Visitor arrives at my web page.

- They are presented with Vostopia menu is 'login' or 'dont remember me' ( I would assume most will choose 'dont remember me' )

- They then head to dressing room and create avatar.

- Then enter world - avatar is instantiated with Photon

Is this right?

I need to release my project in a few weeks. I was in the process of starting my own simple avatar build with Photon but your avatar stylessuits my build so would like to use it. But cant seem to get it to work

Also few of points:

- the exclamation mark for 'face' is a little confusing.
- could not the interface be - choose gender - then choose face and body - gender is hidden away
- is there anyway to change the colour of the default items?

R

 

Hi Reset,

Yes, afaik, it should all be working. What version of the avatar api are you running (see in Assets/vostopia/version.txt), and what kind of compiler errors do you get?

If you could PM/mail me a time that is suitable for you, I can help you get it working via skype. Timezones makes it tricky, but if we could make it at a time that isn't in the middle of the night Europe-time that would be great. My skype username is KvanteTore.

The flow you suggest seems reasonable.

I agree it would make sense to have a kind of "avatar builder" the first time you get an avatar, but we don't have the resources to build one right now. If you really want one, It should be possible to make one with the api that's available though.

cheers!

 

Hi Reset,

Just wanted to add a small note here to say that there'll be a new icon for the "My Avatar" (where the colours, facial features and gender are chosen) in the next update.


Cheers!

 

Hello Mike;

First I would like to say I have been waiting a long time for something like this ! So Thank You Guys !

I was able to get most of you system up in a few hours. LINK

I am trying to get to Beta fairly quickly so I have a few Questions.

_1 How do I pay to go commercial? ( The site didn't allow this. )

_2 After I get the commercial setup working. How do I restrict the outfits so they fit the genre? ( My Title is SteamPunk )

_3 Besides selling New Models/Outfits to my players Can I sell them to all developers in Vostopia??

_4 Has anyone used this with the Roar Engine?? ( Would Love some Examples )

Thanks Again..

 

> _1 How do I pay to go commercial? ( The site didn't allow this. )

The commercial plan is in beta at the moment. I've sent you an email.

> _2 After I get the commercial setup working. How do I restrict the outfits so they fit the genre? ( My Title is SteamPunk )

The best way of doing that is to incentivise the players to use the outfits you create and sell. For example, you could give all your own steampunk themed clothes some kind of bonus. Our experience shows that players will go for bonus-giving clothing.

> _3 Besides selling New Models/Outfits to my players Can I sell them to all developers in Vostopia??

Not at the moment, but having a marketplace where developers you can let other developers sell your items is definitely something that's on our radar.

> _4 Has anyone used this with the Roar Engine?? ( Would Love some Examples )

Not that I'm aware of, but I'd love to see what you're able to do by combining Roar, Vostopia and Photon. It's a pretty awesome combo.

Cheers!

 

I received your email and wrote you back. I will let Unity know about the OSX webplayer loading issue.

 

Ah, Tore beat me to it! ;-)

 

LoL feel free to write to me as well. I'm grfxman on your site.

 

Does vostopia work with 4b11? I sent you a message using Skype. You are about 8 hrs ahead.

 

Hi Mikie,

Yep, it should work with the beta, although the Mecanim stuff isn't in the current release (it'll likely be included once Unity 4 is released).

 

well Unity 4 is open beta now

 

Yes! We're working on a mecanim-supporting build. I hope to have something ready this week

 

good i wanted to upgrade to 4.0 open beta for my game witch i had To put on hold until i can get it working on unity 4

 

Hi,

First of all thanks for a nice avatar system!

When ever I use mixamo animations on the vostopia avatars I get the end of the feets or toes pointing straigth down. Is there anything we can do to solve this?

Regards Zub

 

I've just pushed version 2.1 of the avatar system to our download section http://vostopia.com/developer/downloads. Version 2.1 contains a number of major improvements:

Mecanim Support
Unity just released a public beta for Unity4, with the new mecanim animation system. Vostopia avatars can now be used with the mecanim system to retarget any humanoid animation to the vostopia avatar rig.

New Facial Animation System
Every mouth and eye type now has a number of different expressions that can be set at runtime. The avatars can now blink, smile, frown and be a lot more emotional than before!

In App Purchase support on iOS
Virtual currency can now be purchased on iOS builds through the apple in app purchase system. This enables to you easily create paid virtual currencies on iOS devices. The currency works cross platform, so you can have a common currency between the desktop/web/facebook/mobile versions of your game.

Because the 2.x unitypackages are built with Unity4, you might get some warnings when importing the packages in a Unity3.5 project. Everything except the mecanim integration should still work fine in Unity3.5 though.

cheers,

 

@Zubba, are you interested in trying it using mecanim?

 

Do you have a version that will work with 4.0.0f5? If so I would like to try it. I have put alot time in Daz Studio.

 

Yeah, version 2.1 is built with Unity 4.0.0f5, so the mecanim demo on http://vostopia.com/developer/downloads should work for you.

 

Do I have to have NGUI to make it work?

 

Kvante,

Great I have it working. This is trial??? Is there anyway to get the Avatar I have created to a fbx file? Looks good. I see it is being loaded from your site.

 

Hi Mikie,

No, it's not like Daz, where you as a developer set up an avatar. The idea is that the users get to set up their own avatar, and bring it into your game. They can then also use the same avatar in someone else's game. That is why it's downloading the assets from our server, cause it doesn't know what the avatar will look like before the user has logged on.

On the commercial plan, you can use our system to create avatar assats that you can sell to your customers.

You need NGUI for the dressingroom part, where the user can customize their avatar. You don't need ngui for the basic authentication and loading of an avatar. There's a demo of the dressingroom available on http://vostopia.com/developer/demo

cheers,

 

Tore,

Is it possible to use your system to create an Avatar that I can use in my game and sell the game? If so cost?

 

This is great news. And face animations, really nice!

However I have 1700+ mixamo animations wich currently wont work with vostopia avatars. I truly hope theres something we can do to fix this.

 

I too am interested in how well this works with mixamo animations.

 

Transfering animations can be done with Motion Builder or Maya etc... We have got 120 new animations working with Vostopia just fine.

 

I don't have Maya or Motion Builder.

 

Do you have the mixamo animations downloaded as fbxes? If so, you could use Unity4 and the mecanim retargeting system. It works like a charm.

If you've used the in-unity mixamo store only, it only downloads .clips files, which can not be retargeted by mecanim. I've sourced mixamo animations to the vostopia rig with great success, but Zubba (a few posts above), had some problems with the toes not pointing the right way. I think it might depend on the specific animation.

If you're going to buy mixamo anims for the vostopia avatars, it's probably best to use the included vas_rig_male.fbx and use the mixamo website to download fbxes for the anims your purchasing. That way you can use them with mecanim later.

 

I have mixamo unlimited store, wich is all their animations (clips only). And all animations I've tried have the same problem with the toes pointing straight down on vostopia rig. I have tried to remap the vas_rig_male.fbx with no success so far.

 

I've just tried the mixamo shop, and can confirm your problem with the toe. I'll poke my contact at mixamo and see if there's anything we can do to fix it.

edit: It looks like the problem is only when you use the in-unity mixamo shop. If you use their website, http://mixamo.com, it correctly retargets to vas_rig_male. That might not be an option for you, Zubba, so I'll continue to prod mixamo.

 

Mixamo got back to me, there is a bug in the mixamo auto mapper, which translates from vostopia bone names to mixamo bones. Mixamo are working on a fix, and have said it will be ready in approximately 2 weeks.

In the mean time, you can work around the bug by manually remapping the toe bones. In the unity mixamo store, after you have previewed an animation, a "remap" button appears next to the rig. Click that, and it will open a new browser tab on the mixamo web site. There you can assign mixamo bones (left) to vostopia bones (right). You want to change the default mapping for the feet (click on the feet radio button in the top right corner), such that

LeftToeBase (mixamo) -> LeftFootMiddle1 (vostopia)
LeftFootMiddleA -> LeftFootMiddle2
RightToeBase -> RightFootMiddle1
RightFootMiddleA -> RightFootMiddle2

Hit done and return to unity. Mixamo anims should now retarget correctly.

 

I can verify that the mixamo store clips works with Vostopia avatars if doing the remapping Tore mention above.

I also wish to thank Tore for great support when solving my issues. Many thanks!

Regards
Zubba

 

Sweet! Good luck, and I'd love to see what cool stuff you can come up with using the avatars (feel free to post screenshots etc)

 

Sorry if this is a stupid question. I'm just getting started with your avatar system. When my avatar is spawned, it randomly fires off emote animations every few seconds, which is a pain if my character is in the middle of walking somewhere. Is there a setting somewhere to stop this happening? I can't find anything, but I think I'm probably just looking in the wrong place.