one fun thing to do is have a custom "headless" vnet client that
acts as a 'bot. i whipped one up a while back that responds to
whispers or to the mention of its name in conversation. the bot
can respond either with a chat message or with a gesture message.
state is maintained entirely in the bot client.
more problematic is getting events from the bot's 3d representation
in the client's vrml browser back to the bot. chat is easy, but
it takes some vnet client code hacking to get other kinds of events
back. as a test, i modified a client to send avatar touch sensor
events back to the bot client as whispered messages. although i just
had the bot say "ouch", it could also have smiled or performed some
other gesture.
getting shared events/objects to work "properly" in all contexts
is hard, but with some small hacks you can get some pretty interesting
shared behaviour.
-cks
