Scratch

Taneb wrote:

I don't think that works at all on Ubuntu.

Does for me    (old version of it, though)

shadow_7283 wrote:

Except presentation mode doesn't work.

[Heartfelt welcome to Linux omitted for fear of starting another OS war.]

Does it work for you in Scratch?

No -> Try playing with your display resolution (probably lowering it).

Yes -> Does it work for you in BYOB 3.0.9?

No -> http://byobugs.com

Yes -> Hmm, I don't think anything about displaying is different. ???

Scratch works fine, because I could use the installer. BYOB, on the other hand, is just an image, and Scratch on Ubuntu doesn't contain an image (for me). So I'm running it with Squeak. I think the Scratch team may have worked a bit with the squeak source code to create presentation mode capabilities.

So I don't think it's a bug.

...I did the latter, not the first. Oops. I figured since that was the folder containing the media, it should contain the image too. Apparently I was wrong.

I'm new to Ubuntu though, as you can probably tell. I miss good old "Program Files". 

14God wrote:

@ bharvey, Are you planing to make some new tutorial videos for the new OOP features?

Yes, once the software settles down.  (I also have to do some revision of the old tutorials!)  This is distinct from the OOP-by-lambda tutorial that fullmoon is (I hope) working on.

fullmoon wrote:

I just have to translate the syntax to blocks!

Umm, you can grab that out of the reference manual.  I think even the intermediate stages on the way to full message-to-method translation.

JTxt wrote:

Thought I'd leave this here:
For the Javascript remake of byob, it may be fun to play with mesh-like features with something like

There will definitely be mesh -- we aren't going to take any steps backward.  I'll leave the specific suggestions for Jens to comment on.

Well... we're going to rewrite BYOB from the ground up. That's the biggest step backwards I can think of. I agree that eventually we'll want to do more than we can to today, but along the way I'm sure we'll have to make compromises.

See my "beginner" game kit using some of the recent Byob 3.1 features at :

http://www.xleroy.net/ByobTuto/New/Thumbnails.html

See particularly how to use TELL, a simple but convenient block.

xly wrote:

SCRIPT VARIABLE [a]
SET [a] to ATTRIBUTE [name]
TELL [OBJECT [main]] to
[ SAY [name] [0.8] secs
CHANGE [main.nbhit ] by [1]
]

I was scared when I saw this, because it would be a BYOB bug, but there's a crucial typo in the above: it should be

SAY [a] FOR [0.8] SECS

If it actually said [name] as in the O.P., then the receiver would say its own name.  But script variables, such as [a], don't belong to a sprite; they follow the running script (and another script that it LAUNCHes) no matter what object it talks to.

bharvey wrote:

xly wrote:

SCRIPT VARIABLE [a]
SET [a] to ATTRIBUTE [name]
TELL [OBJECT [main]] to
[ SAY [name] [0.8] secs
CHANGE [main.nbhit ] by [1]
]

I was scared when I saw this, because it would be a BYOB bug, but there's a crucial typo in the above: it should be

SAY [a] FOR [0.8] SECS

If it actually said [name] as in the O.P., then the receiver would say its own name.  But script variables, such as [a], don't belong to a sprite; they follow the running script (and another script that it LAUNCHes) no matter what object it talks to.

I apologize for the typo mistake. Your version is correct. Anyway this gives a way to pass 'data' from one sender to a receiver sprite...this playing the role more or an intelligent  broadcast.

new version of Morphic.js

Hi, all. I have just updated Morphic.js with basic text editing capabilities for TextMorphs (multi line, word wrapping strings). It feels kinda funny to re-invent how text editing works from the bare metal, but if we're contemplating to bootstrap BYOB4 at some point this needs to get done.

Last edited by Jens (2011-03-25 08:48:07)

Today's alpha release isn't about first class sprites, but about hanging variable references:

Jens wrote:

This experimental release attempts to fix a Scratch-inherent problem regarding orphaned and rescoped variable blocks:

In current Scratch (and in current official BYOB) if a global variable is deleted and then a same-named sprite-only new one is created, all blocks referring to the original global variable in existing scripts will always report zero. Worse, once the project is saved the original global variable gets resurrected and often behaved erratically. The same thing happens for deleted sprite-owned variables which are re-introduced as global ones.

Tonight's build tries to remedy this:

Global and sprite-owned variable getter blocks are getting a "desperate evaluator", which kicks in if the object they're bound to (stage for globals or sprite for locals) holds no reference to their variable name, in which case they'll look both locally and globally for any variable name match. If no match is found they will return zero and re-create the deleted global or local variable upon saving (just as Scratch does). However, if another match is found elsewhere the orphaned block gets re-bound to the newly matched reference upon either saving or becoming evaluated.

The result lets you delete any global or local variable and replace it by a same-named but differently scoped new one (local instead of global and vice-versa) without having to adjust anything in your scripts.

Please let me know if this causes any undesired side-effects for you.
Thanks!
--Jens

This solves only one of the possible problems about orphaned variables, but it's one that has come up in practice a lot for one of our alpha-testing teachers.  We're still negotiating about the eventual perfect solution.