MyRobot Development Part 21 (Patreon)

Video shows the summary, text shows the technical!

This week:

• Facial Expressions

• New Voice Sounds

• Improved AI Personality

Facial Expressions

I decided to do facial expressions a bit differently for this project. Normally you add the facial animations to specific body animations in question. But I realized that a lot of the expressions are reused (all idle animations need a similar boring facial expression). So I decoupled the facial animations and moved them to a separate independent animation layer. So now I can have any facial animation be applied to any body animation.

New Voice Sounds

There are now 4 new types of random sound voice lines available. The idea is that there are many repeated actions that warrant the same kind of sound. If the robot gets hit, it says "ow". I don't need a unique "ow" sound every time (it would consume your voice tokens faster!), so in an effort to save voice tokens, I am now caching 5 "ow" sounds at the beginning so that the game always has them available to play without spending more tokens.

This fixed the issue where many of these sounds need to be played IMMEDIATELY and cannot wait a second for the service to generate them for you. So in summary, "ow", "mmhs", "ooh", and "ya" are now played immediately!

One extra problem that arose with this implementation was that if you customize your robot's voice, you need to re-generate the cached voices. And so I made it do just that. Whenever you create a new voice, the system automatically generates the cached VoiceTypes.

Improved AI Personality

This was actually completely accidental. I was optimizing my OpenAI system prompt and whatever combination I used made the robot much more of a child-like curious robot. So I kept it. However I also made it so it speaks by itself a bit more often. This also raised the bar for robot companion.

This was the 2nd week of the "Focus on Character" update, next week is clothing!

Stay tuned!