Scratch

Hmm... it would make certain things easier.
One of the design principles that's really important with Scratch is ease of use. So when we think about new features, we spend a lot of time considering how they will look to a beginning Scratcher, or someone who has never looked at a single line of code.

One thing that would really help us in considering this suggestion is a mockup - or better yet Scratch project - that shows how this feature would be represented / used in the Scratch interface. Keep in mind these design principles that are key to Scratch:

Scratch should have a low floor, a high ceiling, and wide walls.

1. Low floor - super easy for someone with no experience programming to get started and create something.

2. High ceiling - It should be possible to make fairly complex creations with Scratch. (Your suggestion is, metaphorically speaking, a way to make the ceiling a little bit higher. Which is great - but we don't want to also raise the floor..    )

3. Wide walls - Scratch should be able to create lots of different kinds of projects - animations, stories,  games, simulations and many other things the Scratch Team could never imagine when we designed Scratch.

MyRedNeptune wrote:

Go ask Jens or someone to make it with BYOB. :3

I know how to make it it BYOB - it'd just not work on normal scratch and even then be very slow because the more blocks scratch has to interpret the slower the project. D:

There *is* something like grouping of sprites in BYOB, it's called nested sprites. You can make a sprite that has one or more subsprites. Then, whenever a subsprite touches or otherwise senses something that gets propagated to its owner sprite. However, the subsprites in BYOB cannot move independently of their owner sprites, because they are really *parts* of it. So it doesn't quite meet the proposal of this thread (which, btw, I like very much!).

I suppose in Scratch 2.0 they're going to make online and offline projects run in the same way, aren't they? So that way, you could use the list method    But it's going to be another year(ish), so it would be nice for now...

Variables and lists are hard to new Scratchers.

I mean, adding this won't make aanythin actually harder. It justs adds a feature. The other blocks still work the same.

I don't see how this truly effects new users, unless you mean you want them to knwo what every block does.

scratchman10000 wrote:

I agree. I don't see why there couldn't be new more advanced blocks on scratch, as long as they don't affect the current blocks.

Yep.

If new users aren't pressured onto using them (aren't neccesary to make a good simple project) then adding it should create no problem.

Great idea!

Guys! You can already do this! 

1. Add all the enemy sprite names into a list called Enemies
2. Then, if touching item any of Enemies.

It works.

fg123's method is only good in the situation where you don't need to detect which sprite in the series you are touching.

Usually I would use a loop like the one fullmoon posted in page 2 but with scratch this doesn't work well because of the lag.

I think that this isn't too useful in scratch because there are already ways to do this and scratch can't take too many sprites (or dupe them) which limits the situations where you would need this. If extra speed and sprite duping were added this would be a easy alternative to using a loop.

Last edited by archmage (2010-07-16 13:32:03)

Awesome idea! we should totally do thathttp://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?id=29141#req_message!

I support!

I support and here's a mockup of some neat features I want:

Last edited by MasterOfDeception (2010-07-20 18:04:18)