We at FullSpectrum love animations. Nothing adds more to a virtual environment than Non-Player-Characters (NPCs). It is our mission to provide as many NPCs animals and fantasy creatures alike to populate virtual worlds like Sansar. We are constantly working on improving the AI for our creatures as well. The video below shows the typical setup for one of our “roaming” NPCs. We also have waypoint script in the work with animals that can detect users and attack or follow you. Many exciting creatures and ways to have fun with them are in the work.

You are also more than welcome to visit our demo experience or the animal sanctuary.

GENERAL SETUP FOR ROAMING CREATURES

Most importantly your terrain and floor needs to be labeled with “Terrain”. It is not case sensitive so you can just add “terrain” to your floor or terrain name.

The NPC label helps the script to avoid collisions with other NPC characters. The difference compared to avoiding regular obstacles is that it will look closer and turn more immediately.

Seed, please choose a 6+ digit random number for each of your deer. This way they will be nicely randomized.

Max Idle Time: The minimum time the deer will idle. The deer has pretty long idle poses which will add to the idle time.

Max Move Time: Keep your deer moving around. The move time should be a lot longer than the idle time as the walk cycles are much shorter, but you decide what you like. The times are randomized for a more natural effect.

Action idle:
The deer has build in eating animations. They get triggered when the deer finds objects with the label “grass”. The deer will not height adjust when walking over objects labeled grass. However avatars will be raised because of the necessary collision. Therefore you want to lower the collision of your food objects to be very near the ground.

We have grass for sale that is both beautiful and properly pre-configured. Click to find in the SANSAR Store

Roam Center:
So that your animals do not walk out of the experience you can set a radius that they will attempt to stay in. This is the center of the radius used. Please do not leave this value at <0,0,0> unless that is your roaming center.

Max Roam Radius:
Radius to keep your deer in. This is a soft border so that the movement of the deer looks more natural.

Max Roam Height: The deer adjusts to the terrain height, but having four legs certainly cannot handle steep terrain changes. The best values for your terrain height are small values. Please experiment.

The label “phantom” can be used on any object that the deer should ignore. It will walk right through the object even if it has a collision. This can be very useful for ground plants. The plants that trigger NPC’s eating (or other response) cycles are automatically treated as phantom. Please make sure the collision of those plants are close to the ground as discussed under “Action Idle”.