Peedy the Parrot

Back in the day (Win XP?) Microsoft had various “agents” the could be incorporated for use with VB apps, as well as Word, Excel etc.

Peedy the Parrot was one of them, there was a Genie, a Robot, a Butler and a few others.

It seemed to me that at one time, I determined that one of the files associated with each of these agents contained a series of graphic images that were overlayed in various combinations to create the animation of the character.

I was wondering if anyone else remembers it being that way, and if anyone knows what the file was, where it can be downloaded, and what format it was in.

I’d like (for my own fun) to try and extract all the images if possible, and create an Xojo app to re-animate the character (most interested in Peedy)

I remember writing a VB app that would sleep until 2am, then fly across the screen, saying “Do you know what time it is?!” [my wife had a tendency to stay up too late]

“It looks like you’re writing a letter getting nostalgic” :wink:

Looks like it was an .act file

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/lwef/using-the-microsoft-agent-character-editor

Looks like BMPs

Hope the links help, have fun :slight_smile:

You mean Clippy. Oh man, I had to kill the thing quite a few times.

Similar… Clippy was ‘part’ of Office, but Peedy the parrot ( and a whole bunch of other characters) could be programmed in simple code to fly about, point at stuff, say things in speech bubbles, or even use the voice synthesiser.
I used to use this a lot too.

There was Peedy the parrot, Merlin, a Robot, Genie, Santa, and various others.

A french company called ‘Living Actor’ sold compatible characters, and have now moved on to Chatbots (which these days look more like you are playing Sims 4 …)

https://www.livingactor.com/corp/en/living-actor-avatars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1XAIpV4aIQ

Ah the memories :slight_smile: