This is the last part of the series on Bavardica. Apart from a user friendly and colourful user interface, the other features include the edition of the character outlook in real time (while on the scene). Here again, hair style, skin, clothes and shoes can be changed. Additionally, colours of all those garments can also be changed. The way it works is pretty similar to the way a character is created.

 

In the meanwhile, some other functions had been added:

   Collision detection: This is to make sure that bavards don’t get out of the scene boundary. Also, they don’t walk inside each other when move vertically. This feature is based on simple “if conditions” that check whether the move doesn’t not lead outside the scene or at a position occupied by another character.

 

   Bubbling: That function is used to process text entered in bubble (graphic mode). Every time a user sends a message, it appears on the scene as a flying bubble that gradually disappears. An animation had been designed for this purpose. So both motion and opacity animations are applied to the bubble object. Each key pressed is processed individually as the bubble does not rely on a textbox. The main issue in this task was that the positions of special characters change according to the keyboard type. Finally the bubble handles pretty smoothly conversations from American and british keyboards.

 

 

   More rooms

The current application contains a single scene where all the public conversations happen. A good extension could be to have many scenes and a map to navigate among the scene.

 

   More music

The music background is always the same mp3 track playing all over again. It is intended in the next version to have a playlist of tracks as music background. Further, since there will be many rooms, each room will have a different theme and a different kind of music.

 

   More cybavards

Due to the large amount of time and data required to simulate the talk of a single cybavard, it has not been possible to provide more than one of those cyber bavards. The process in their creation is pretty simple. It’s mainly a matter of time. For instance, the cybavard in this demo has a knowledge base of nearly 4 megabytes (of text).

 

   More interactions for a better interaction

The only animations available at the moment are walking in all 4 directions and breathing while the character is idle. It is planned to add more animations like dancing, running, jumping. There will be some moves to express the character’s mood. At a later stage, there could be animations that involve more than one character, like hug or hand shake. It is also planned to have more animations for characters to express their moods.

 

A working version is available at http://bavardica.com