Scratch

woofwoof301 wrote:

what? WHAT?! So because you are angry at something, you want everybody else's way changed to fit yours? Dude, just click an extra button.

...Not that hard...

^This is the best post I've seen all day.[image removed by moderator. Please refrain from posting meme images as replies as it can be seen as spam]

Last edited by cheddargirl (2011-09-11 20:50:21)

cygene wrote:

No, but what I mean is that I think the single stepping (normal mode) makes Scratch slower. If you look at the flash turbo speed, it's a lot faster, but it could be faster if turbo speed was on by default.

And DON'T CALL ME LAZY. It's everyone else who "likes" single stepping since they're just too lazy to add a few wait blocks to control the speed.

Just because you don't like something doesn't mean the world should change FOR you.
If you ask me, it's fine just the way it is. I'm sorry, but I don't support.
(That better cheddar, Harakou, or whoever else might have deleted my comment?)

Last edited by Trekkie210 (2011-09-11 15:50:14)

Trekkie210 wrote:

cygene wrote:

No, but what I mean is that I think the single stepping (normal mode) makes Scratch slower. If you look at the flash turbo speed, it's a lot faster, but it could be faster if turbo speed was on by default.

And DON'T CALL ME LAZY. It's everyone else who "likes" single stepping since they're just too lazy to add a few wait blocks to control the speed.

Just because you don't like something doesn't mean the world should change FOR you.
If you ask me, it's fine just the way it is. I'm sorry, but I don't support.
(That better cheddar, Harakou, or whoever else might have deleted my comment?)

You know we could keep arguing all day on whoever is lazy or change here, but it's not up to me anyway. And judging by the fact that there are moving from Squeak to Flash makes me assume that they want to speed up the programs. And the world would not just change for me, there are MANY MANY more people who want a faster programming language. Actually, 99% want a faster language (I'm not just talking on scratch, I mean ALL languages). Think about it, Scratch is the only language that doesn't have Turbo mode as default. Instead, Scratch makes it's project slower by default. If Scratch is the only one to do this, does that mean that it is good? C++ runs as fast as it can, and so does C, NXT-G, and FLASH. Imagine running your computer (windows is mostly C++) at half the speed than it can actually run. Would you want that?

Trekkie210 wrote:

cygene wrote:

Trekkie210 wrote:

Just because you don't like something doesn't mean the world should change FOR you.
If you ask me, it's fine just the way it is. I'm sorry, but I don't support.
(That better cheddar, Harakou, or whoever else might have deleted my comment?)

You know we could keep arguing all day on whoever is lazy or change here, but it's not up to me anyway. And judging by the fact that there are moving from Squeak to Flash makes me assume that they want to speed up the programs. And the world would not just change for me, there are MANY MANY more people who want a faster programming language. Actually, 99% want a faster language (I'm not just talking on scratch, I mean ALL languages). Think about it, Scratch is the only language that doesn't have Turbo mode as default. Instead, Scratch makes it's project slower by default. If Scratch is the only one to do this, does that mean that it is good? C++ runs as fast as it can, and so does C, NXT-G, and FLASH. Imagine running your computer (windows is mostly C++) at half the speed than it can actually run. Would you want that?

If you want a faster programming language, then don't use Scratch. (No offense meant). It's slow for a reason, and that reason is to make it easier for beginning programmers. You mention earlier that people should learn to program correctly, but how can they learn to program correctly if Scratch teaches them to forever add "wait" blocks? I'm sorry but that doesn't make any sense to me.

You talk about Scratch is for teaching people to program, but if you don't teach people to program correctly (using wait blocks), how is it beneficial. What if, from scratch, someone moves on to another language, making animations, but could not figure out why it's running so fast. Wait blocks are useful because no matter the speed of the language, 1 second is always 1 second long. So even if you port an animation to another language, it will work properly as long as you use wait blocks. This speed difference is more important at more advanced projects, though, like video games. I actually like Scratch, it's a good language, I just think it's speed is such a drawback, considering it CAN already run fast with the flash player.

cygene wrote:

No, but what I mean is that I think the single stepping (normal mode) makes Scratch slower. If you look at the flash turbo speed, it's a lot faster, but it could be faster if turbo speed was on by default.

And DON'T CALL ME LAZY. It's everyone else who "likes" single stepping since they're just too lazy to add a few wait blocks to control the speed.

Oh dear, I don't think you've read my post last time where I pointed out that single-stepping is not the default speed. 

cheddargirl wrote:

Actually single-stepping isn't the default setting in Scratch - you need to click on the "Edit" option in the menu bar and select the option from the drop-down menu to start single-stepping. Otherwise, projects will run at normal speed. 

In case a clarification is needed about single-stepping in Scratch:
Normal speed is NOT single-stepping since you are not watching Scratch "step through" the project. You only go into single-stepping mode when you click on "flash blocks (fast)" or "flash blocks (slow)" so you can watch Scratch "step through" the blocks as they execute (if you're using Scratch 1.4, notice the ability to stop single-stepping isn't enabled until you select "flash blocks (fast)" or "flash blocks (slow)" as the speed).

The fact that normal speed and turbo speed are located under the single-stepping option in the menu is rather confusing since you can't really see the "step through" process as the project is being executed. That being said, a person would really be choosing "flash blocks (fast)" or "flash blocks (slow)" if they were being incredibly lazy to use wait blocks since it is that option where intentional time pauses are added between blocks in a script.   

And actually, there are cases of computer programs in which it is set to a normal speed and you often have to change the settings to make it run faster or slower (the program controlling mouse speed is a pretty good example of this    ).

I think it's because turbo uses a-lot more power, so even animations with wait blocks would jump. 

cheddargirl wrote:

I often wish there was way to set the speed to be faster than normal but slower than turbo. 

Me too. 

I think there's some confusion around here about what actually speeds up Scratch from 'normal speed' to 'turbo speed' (I'm intentionally avoiding the term 'single stepping' because it has nothing to do with what is being discussed here.)

Scratch's normal mode has a futile time-based delay built in but you will hardly notice that. There are other factors that impact the execution speed of Scratch projects though:

Internally, the Scratch program can only execute one block in a project at a time. You can see it as a pointer that is somewhere around your scripts. Scratch moves on from script to script cleverly to give you the illusion that scripts are running simultaneously.

After some types of blocks, Scratch does a screen update: the sprites get rendered on the stage properly together with pen drawings. These screen updates take up some time. More low-level programming languages require you to decide manually when to update the screen, Scratch ofcourse does not. It does these screen updates very often, so you can (at least in editing mode) always see what is happening. If you use two 'go tox: y:' blocks, you will be able to see the flash. You wouldn't do this screen update there in any other programming language, but it is required in Scratch for many reasons: you constantly see what is happening on the stage, you can rely on the new position for sensing, ...

After a loop iteration, you experience a longer delay because Scratch moves on to other running stacks and executes those.

In presentation mode, Scratch has a lot less to draw (no more scripts pane, sprite pane, blocks, ...) and these screen updates are a lot faster.

On turbo speed, Scratch drastically cuts the number of screen updates. A whole bunch of calculations are done at the same time (hence the CPU usage) and every now and then it still draws something on the screen. Sure, some projects that are designed to work on turbo speed work fine. But the majority of projects will never work.

Turbo speed, skipping so much screen updates, is basically just not what the Scratch team (or most community members) wants. It's a design decision and it has nothing to do with 'building in a wait'.

(I'm not familiar with the Scratch source code so this is what I've been told a long time ago, modders/ST feel free to correct me)

Edit: Here's a link that might be interesting to those of you who want to speed up projects. It's 4 years ago, my English was awful but I got wonderful replies 

LS97 - hehe correcting my post above 

Doing a full 'world' redraw when you can expect only the stage has changed seems a bit like a waste to me. But hey, the next Scratch will be flash based so it will run differently 

Trekkie210 wrote:

cygene wrote:

No, but what I mean is that I think the single stepping (normal mode) makes Scratch slower. If you look at the flash turbo speed, it's a lot faster, but it could be faster if turbo speed was on by default.

And DON'T CALL ME LAZY. It's everyone else who "likes" single stepping since they're just too lazy to add a few wait blocks to control the speed.

Just because you don't like something doesn't mean the world should change FOR you.
If you ask me, it's fine just the way it is. I'm sorry, but I don't support.

This is about scratch not the whole world    and I thought the scratch team were taking suggestions? So I suppose that if someone suggests something were supposed to ask them if they think the whole world should change because of their suggestion?

slinger wrote:

Trekkie210 wrote:

cygene wrote:

No, but what I mean is that I think the single stepping (normal mode) makes Scratch slower. If you look at the flash turbo speed, it's a lot faster, but it could be faster if turbo speed was on by default.

And DON'T CALL ME LAZY. It's everyone else who "likes" single stepping since they're just too lazy to add a few wait blocks to control the speed.

Just because you don't like something doesn't mean the world should change FOR you.
If you ask me, it's fine just the way it is. I'm sorry, but I don't support.

This is about scratch not the whole world    and I thought the scratch team were taking suggestions? So I suppose that if someone suggests something were supposed to ask them if they think the whole world should change because of their suggestion?

The whole point of the Suggestions section is for people to discuss about what is posted there. And I'm discussing.

Wow, there's been a lot of activity here. The original reason for me posting this was I need Scratch to be much faster, and many people do (I make stuff like raycasters, prime number generators, and other high-framerate games. So,  I thought that it would be better is turbo speed was default, for reasons I have already spoken about above. But now it seems that Turbo speed isn't exactly what I expected, with all the screen refresh, code delays, etc spoken of above. So, now I'm thinking that there should be an option to set turbo as default.

I just have one question, though: why does the turbo in flash run much much faster than the turbo in scratch?