| Platform SDK: Agent |
Use the Microsoft Office Palette when designing your characters to minimize any potential palette realization issues. Avoid selecting a transparency color that is similar to the colors that you use in your document.
You can download the Office Palette bitmap file at http://www.microsoft.com/msagent/downloads/assistpalet.bmp in the tools directory where the ACE cab is kept.
Microsoft Agent enables you to play sounds in your animations. We recommend you do not include sounds for your Idle animations. This is so there won't be a delay in the middle of the animation, if Agent has to load the system multimedia DLL.
Typical Office Assistants are 123 x 93 pixels. While you can create characters of other sizes, they will be scaled to 123 x 93 in the Assistant Gallery.
All animations except for Goodbye, Greeting, Show and Hide should begin and end with the RestPose animation. Microsoft Office does not play explicit Return animations, so you should not define them. All animations should also have Exit Branching. Exit branching enables us to 'hurry up and finish' the current animation before we call the next animation. If you don't supply Exit Branching, the transition between animations may be jerky.
Microsoft Agent enables you to set the character's Name, Description and ExtraData properties. Microsoft Office uses the ExtraData field to hold to one or more Introduction Phrases and Reminder Phrases. Microsoft Office picks from the other Introduction Phrases to put in the speech balloon in the Assistant Gallery. We use the Reminder Phrases when you receive a reminder from Outlook.
The ExtraData field is formatted as follows:
IntroPhrase1~~IntroPhrase2~~IntroPhrase3^^ReminderPhrase1~~ReminderPhrase2~~ReminderPhrase3
Intro Phrases are separated by a pair of tilde characters (~), followed by Reminder Phrases. These Reminder Phrases are also separated by a pair of tilde characters. The two sets of phrases are separated by two caret characters (^^). There is no limit to the number of each kind of phrase, except that there must be at least one of each.
