[Opensim-dev] NPC Module?

[John Sheridan]

I've been doing a bit of digging around inside the OpenSim code these 
past few days and I noticed a few sections which appear to be sort of a 
built in non-playing character.  It almost appears to be a sim based 
avatar or bot.  I was wondering how far along this is and if its ready 
for use?  If so, would anyone happen to have a quick tutorial or example 
to work off of?

Right now as an alternative to using the inventory based library as I'm 
running in grid mode (not to mention each attempt at importing directly 
to the library has failed horribly) I'm currently storing an aweful lot 
of assets in world using freely copyable boxes.  While this works well 
as a temporary fix until a better solution for the inventory based 
library can be formed, it also tends to eat alot of the server's memory 
- so much so that I've had to limit that one server down to three sims 
meanwhile another of the same configuration is able to handle eight. 

While poking around I came up with the idea of an OS function that could 
be used to give inventory items out of a script owner's inventory, 
however I cant seem to figure out how exactly to get that to work.  So 
far the only functions I could find only seem to work using a prim's 
inventory.  While I'm still digging around for a solution on that one 
(my apologies as I'm a bit of a newbie to the OpenSim code base), as an 
alternative I wonder if an NPC / bot based method could also work 
wherein an NPC module could be setup to respond to certain chat commands 
and then give items or folders from its own inventory. 

Thanks, :)

Orion Pseudo / Shamroy