Scratch

I like your ideas, also, you should include Sending & Recieving.

Changing the topic, some things you could do are:

-Highscore tables. The basics. As you play the game, it will record what you do with lists (so you can watch and tell if it was a hacker), then it would send the lists and the score, and then you could access the highscore table and see other people's scores, and watch them, and moderators would take out the fake ones.

-Online Chatrooms, talking. Not too hard, but might be a bit complex. By using Chalkmarrow's talking GUI widget, it would send the variables of the letters online, and it would send it to everybody in order and it would appear on their screens.

-MMORPGs. Well, lets put it this way, ITS SUPERYDUPERY HARD. Well you'd first of all use the talking module (above), you'd have to send there x position in the entire world (assuming its a scrolling MMO), you'd send which rank you are which would change the costume, and of course for the player to appear on the other screen, there would have to be sprites which would appear as the player, and of course there would have to be a limit.

Of course, just some ideas =P

The one problem I have with the "remote sensor" method of networking control is over three issues:

1) The protocol is needlessly huge.  There is a bunch of information which simply isn't needed for most applications, and the protocol is needlessly complex for purely networked applications.  This complexity also slows down the transmission of data considerably as well... over and above the already slow processing speed of interpreted Scratch.

2) The network requires the installation/creation of additional networking applications above and beyond just Scratch.  What I'm proposing here is something that is completely native to Scratch as a language and not something hacked onto a feature to make it do something it wasn't really designed to do in the first place.

3) Perhaps restating the above problem, but the remote sensor approach is a huge kludge of the worst kind that generally programmers of all types should avoid if possible.  This is hardly teaching sound software development techniques, and certainly shouldn't be something in a "teaching language" like Scratch.

Yes, I'll admit we could even develop a "generic networking" kind of 3rd party applet that would be a hack on a kludge on a back door approach to getting networking going.  Kind of reminds me of writing device drivers for Windows... try PCI device drivers if you want to see convoluted communications... but that isn't what I'm trying to address here.

When I was in 9th grade oh so many years ago, I wrote a simple IRC-like community chat program that consisted of about 200 lines of BASIC on a timeshare system that had some interesting networking characteristics built into the variant of that language.  I'd love to see that experience brought forward into Scratch, so kids here could easily do something just like that and not have to kludge something to make it work.  With this protocol as I'm proposing, I think I might be able to get a chat program down under a few dozen Scratch blocks and no extra "software" beyond a network-modified Scratch.  Multi-player (not necessarily "Massive") role-playing games wouldn't be significantly larger... at least in terms of similar kinds of RPG-type games that are currently being developed on Scratch.

I certainly think you could teach the seven-layer network model very effectively using Scratch as the application layer and teaching some basic of TCP/IP or networking theory in general for a high-school level of student... and perhaps even some middle school students could grasp the concept as well if presented properly.  This isn't rocket science.

Jens wrote:

Actually, you do not need (to write or obtain) any middleware to make several Scratch sessions communicate directly with each other, if you take the existing Source Code and activate that (currently experimental and thus disabled) feature. This uses TCP/IP and the protocol is IMO very slim and straightforward. Afterwards each Scratch session can directly sense all global variables and broadcast / receive all messages of all other connected sessions. You can even simulate networked sessions on the same computer.

How would you activate that feature?

Jens wrote:

To enable "NetScratch" (or rather networked Scratch sessions) try this:

   1. Open the Scratch Source Code.
   2. Go to ScratchFrameMorph -> #addServerCommandsTo:
   3. Change the first line to: disable := false.
   4. Open Scratch (several times).
   5. Connect using the Extras-Menu.

Enjoy!

Now, while this will connect Scratch sessions among each other it does not answer Roberth's issue of how networking could be expressed using Scratch blocks.

This is an extremely interesting question and very thought-provoking idea, and I'm still very curious about any ideas how these two could perhaps be combined so students may learn about networking and program simple networked applications using Scratch.

Any further thoughts / ideas on this?

Thanks.

I guess

disable < false

works too? (at least it did for me...) 

I am going to test out it's features!

JSO, every session in the mesh receives every broadcast in the mesh (from other projects as well as from itself), but as of now you have to know the message names of the other projects, as you don't find them in the drop-down menus. Also, every project in the mesh can sense any global variable of other connected projects using the sensor block (like in remote sensing). This in effect lets you do virtually anything (!)

Would be an idea

how do u use it though?

abee wrote:

Hi,
I made another solution that supports peer-to-peer connection by Scratch Networking Protocol.
I add two new blocks:
'broadcast [message] to [address]' for 'Control' category.
'update sensor [name] with [value] to [address]' for 'Sensing' category.

I found this thread today and I think NetScratch is more flexible. However my one may be of some help. So I publish it.
http://squeakland.jp/abee/tmp/NetworkingProtocolClient.zip

Best,
Kazuhiro Abe

P.S.
I and my colleague made another network collaboration system named NetMorph for Squeak Etoys between 2002 to 2005.
http://swikis.ddo.jp/NetMorph

the example wont work