Is it possible to edit the pleo.urf file?

[brian55127]

Has anyone tried editing the pleo.urf (holiday) file or do you think the developers would release a "template" pleo.urf file that has pleo's basic personality in it?

[PleoPet]

Yes.
Several people have reverse engineered the file format. It is rather simple.
There will be some free tools available shortly.
They will let you create brand new simple entertainment personalities, and create new motions and sound skits.
You can also reuse the performances from existing personality.
----
Related discussion:
The Holiday/Xmas personality *randomly* performs one of six song-and-dance routines. I remapped the logic so specific songs were played when you pressed each leg (and back and head). If you have two Pleos, they will sing the same song at the same time.
Changing the logic in the default personality is much harder and not supported at the current time. However you can reuse most of the sounds and motions. The hard part is figuring out which sounds/motions to use (there are a lot of them)
---
Also in many cases you don't need to change the PLEO.URF file. There is a 'mirroring' feature that lets you keep the original PLEO.URF file (which can be large) and selectively replace specific resources (sounds, motions, scripts)
The basic personality (default personality) is stored in the 4MB data store inside of Pleo. At the current time there is no website download of that file (3.5MB in size). However you can easily make a copy of it onto an SD card by running a simple command script on your Pleo.

[Caaahl]

Yes.
Several people have reverse engineered the file format. It is rather simple.
There will be some free tools available shortly.
They will let you create brand new simple entertainment personalities, and create new motions and sound skits.
You can also reuse the performances from existing personality.
----
Related discussion:
The Holiday/Xmas personality *randomly* performs one of six song-and-dance routines. I remapped the logic so specific songs were played when you pressed each leg (and back and head). If you have two Pleos, they will sing the same song at the same time.
Changing the logic in the default personality is much harder and not supported at the current time. However you can reuse most of the sounds and motions. The hard part is figuring out which sounds/motions to use (there are a lot of them)
---
Also in many cases you don't need to change the PLEO.URF file. There is a 'mirroring' feature that lets you keep the original PLEO.URF file (which can be large) and selectively replace specific resources (sounds, motions, scripts)
The basic personality (default personality) is stored in the 4MB data store inside of Pleo. At the current time there is no website download of that file (3.5MB in size). However you can easily make a copy of it onto an SD card by running a simple command script on your Pleo.

That sounds veeery interesting. Looking forward to this stuff.

[brian55127]

Yes.
Several people have reverse engineered the file format. It is rather simple.
There will be some free tools available shortly.
They will let you create brand new simple entertainment personalities, and create new motions and sound skits.
You can also reuse the performances from existing personality.
----
Related discussion:
The Holiday/Xmas personality *randomly* performs one of six song-and-dance routines. I remapped the logic so specific songs were played when you pressed each leg (and back and head). If you have two Pleos, they will sing the same song at the same time.
Changing the logic in the default personality is much harder and not supported at the current time. However you can reuse most of the sounds and motions. The hard part is figuring out which sounds/motions to use (there are a lot of them)
---
Also in many cases you don't need to change the PLEO.URF file. There is a 'mirroring' feature that lets you keep the original PLEO.URF file (which can be large) and selectively replace specific resources (sounds, motions, scripts)
The basic personality (default personality) is stored in the 4MB data store inside of Pleo. At the current time there is no website download of that file (3.5MB in size). However you can easily make a copy of it onto an SD card by running a simple command script on your Pleo.

How do you command pleo to dump the stored pleo.urf onto an inserted SD card or is that classified information? :confused:

[brian55127]

I took a little peek at the holiday pleo.urf file in a Hex Editor. The most interesting parts are the tags at the end. He sure seems to be able to have a lot of moods!

[PleoWorldHostCami]

How do you command pleo to dump the stored pleo.urf onto an inserted SD card or is that classified information? :confused:

Hi brian

I'm not sure I understand? The Holiday behavior stays on the SD card and only works when the card is in Pleo. All you should have to do is remove the SD card and Pleo will be back to normal. :D

[brian55127]

Hi brian

I'm not sure I understand? The Holiday behavior stays on the SD card and only works when the card is in Pleo. All you should have to do is remove the SD card and Pleo will be back to normal. :D

Hi Pleoworldhostcami. Yes I understand that, but I wanted to see and compare what the default pleo.urf vs. the holiday pleo.urf looks like so that I might edit the default pleo.urf file, copy it onto an SD card, and pleo should use THAT file as his current personality instead of the internal one, as long as the SD card is inserted, correct?

[PleoPet]

> There will be some free tools available shortly.
Checkout the PleoSkit thread. You can use PleoSkit to create other PLEO.URF files (with some of your own sounds/motions). As an added bonus, it tacks on a library of useful sounds/motions/commands.
Test version of YAPT coming soon. That will help you exploit all these things.

> How do you command pleo to dump the stored pleo.urf onto an inserted SD card or is that classified information?
The process of grabbing the default PLEO.URF is described here:
http://www.aibohack.com/pleo/tech2.htm#GRAB
(documentation is a little sloppy so please email me if anything is too obscure; USE AT YOUR OWN RISK)

> I took a little peek at the holiday pleo.urf file in a Hex Editor. The most interesting parts are the tags at the end. He sure seems to be able to have a lot of moods!
The Holiday Pleo personality is relatively simple. Holiday Pleo randomly picks one of 6 song-and-dance routines to perform. The default personality "PLEOPM" is much more complex (has age, mood and other properties)
I'm working to document more of my reverse engineering discoveries (looking at the resources in the default and Holiday personalities)
Tutorials for YAPT are not done yet, but one will include how you turn the random Holiday Pleo (plays one of six songs picked randomly) into a more predicatable singer (ie. press a leg to play a specific song).

[UgobeTyler]

As a Ugobe employee - and one of the programmers - I feel compelled to say the following: take care when when taking advantage of these "reverse engineered discoveries".

We designed and built the Pleo software to be as flexible and open as possible (no, not open source), with less "security" put in than we could have, in order to make a more interesting development platform. Please be cautious in passing on details which may possibly do damage to a Pleo (eg. the "USE AT YOUR OWN RISK WARNING" given below).

And, as with most platforms: we reserve the right to change anything, anytime, with or without notice. (OK, that is me talking - it was not cleared by any legal scholar or consul).

As to the pleo.urf file, as PleoPet points out, it is a pretty simple format. We were going for ease of lookup, in order to optimize performance. And we did on the DataFlash. Be careful running such a large urf file off SD though, at least in Pleo 1.0.

Thank you,
Tyler

[brian55127]

As a Ugobe employee - and one of the programmers - I feel compelled to say the following: take care when when taking advantage of these "reverse engineered discoveries".

We designed and built the Pleo software to be as flexible and open as possible (no, not open source), with less "security" put in than we could have, in order to make a more interesting development platform. Please be cautious in passing on details which may possibly do damage to a Pleo (eg. the "USE AT YOUR OWN RISK WARNING" given below).

And, as with most platforms: we reserve the right to change anything, anytime, with or without notice. (OK, that is me talking - it was not cleared by any legal scholar or consul).

As to the pleo.urf file, as PleoPet points out, it is a pretty simple format. We were going for ease of lookup, in order to optimize performance. And we did on the DataFlash. Be careful running such a large urf file off SD though, at least in Pleo 1.0.

Thank you,
Tyler

Hi Tyler,

I used Pleoskit (I assume Pleoskit is Ugobe-approved software?) to create a custom pleo.urf file for Pleo, it is 3MB even though it only has several actions in it. Is that "too large" for Pleo 1.0 to run off of? Would pleo possibly crash in the middle of accessing the data?

[roschler]

Any chance Ugobe will release a library of the existing animations for assemblly in PleoSkit? That would be awesome! :)

[UgobeTyler]

Brian55127,

Don't worry, if the pleo.urf is "too large" Pleo 1.0 will not crash. The worst case is you may hear some sound breakup, or motions may not play as smoothly as possible. This is something you may never see on a good fast SD Card, I only point it out because it is something we have seen in some cases, so I thought it might be worth pointing out. Perhaps I should not have said anything. :-)

roschler,

I expect that part of a PDK release will be some motion samples to include in custom applications. I would expect these could also be used in PleoSkit (which Ugobe is aware of, and supports its author when needed, but it was developed semi-independently from Ugobe, so any features or enhancements are handled solely by its author).

Thanks,
Tyler

[roschler]

Thanks Tyler! I'll be playing with PleoSkit myself in the next few days.

[PleoPet]

> Any chance Ugobe will release a library of the existing animations for assemblly in PleoSkit?
Take a look at the PleoSkit motion "Library" (CTRL-L if you don't see it on the right hand side). These are some of the most useful motions (Dogsbody has done the work to clean them up and categorize them for you)
Also the resulting PLEO.URF created with the "Write Flash Drive" command includes a large library of common motions and sounds (and animation commands) tacked on at the end. These are usable with the soon-to-be-released YAPT program.

re: PLEO.URF too large
As mentioned before, the Pawn runtime does a great job of swapping in the necessary resources to play realtime. I have a 6MB+ personality that runs great with uncompressed audio (on a fast enough SD card).

[roschler]

PleoPet,

Excellent, thanks for the tip! I hope people see your note about getting an SD card with a fast enough transfer rate. Looking forward to seeing YAPT too.

[brian55127]

> Any chance Ugobe will release a library of the existing animations for assemblly in PleoSkit?
Take a look at the PleoSkit motion "Library" (CTRL-L if you don't see it on the right hand side). These are some of the most useful motions (Dogsbody has done the work to clean them up and categorize them for you)
Also the resulting PLEO.URF created with the "Write Flash Drive" command includes a large library of common motions and sounds (and animation commands) tacked on at the end. These are usable with the soon-to-be-released YAPT program.

re: PLEO.URF too large
As mentioned before, the Pawn runtime does a great job of swapping in the necessary resources to play realtime. I have a 6MB+ personality that runs great with uncompressed audio (on a fast enough SD card).

Wow what speed rating is the SD card that you are using? I guess the filesize of the pleo.urf file is theoretically unlimited then to the size of the SD card it is on? How fast can pleo himself stream data off of the SD card?

[PleoPet]

> Looking forward to seeing YAPT too.
Please give it a try. http://forums.pleoworld.com/showthread.php?t=1265

> Wow what speed rating is the SD card that you are using?
The sustained SD card speed appears not to matter much (audio at 11KHz, 8 bits only needs a sustained transfer rate of 88KB/sec. For ADPCM compressed audio it is half that. That's not very fast compared to SD card *top* speeds, which are in MB/sec)

> I guess the filesize of the pleo.urf file is theoretically unlimited then to the size of the SD card it is on?
There is a directory that it needs to scan, but I believe that is read in when needed as well (there is very little free RAM). The PleoSkit tool will create a URF by default that includes a large library of routines you probably won't use (at least not at first). They will be waiting on the SD card if/when you need them.