At 12:36 AM 7/23/99, Luciano Notarfrancesco wrote:
>This capability is very important. How are actor classes generated? There 
>should be a hierarchy of actors. Some actors could be animals (with legs), 
>and you teach them to walk. Special kind of animals could be humans, and you 
>teach them to talk (showing a balloon with the dialogues, for instance).

In general this is unrealistic, because it assumes a sane and uniform
naming scheme for the parts of objects, and based on experience this just
doesn't happen.  Look at the ToySoldier and AliceLiddel models as an
example: both have legs and shins, but the naming scheme is completely
different so you can't reuse animations from one model to the other.  And
that's from two modelers in the same research group; imagine what models
from completely different sources look like.

In the current implementation you get half a loaf: each model has a
protoClass (a la the Etoys protoClass mechanism Scott Wallace built), and
each instance of that model has a protoClass.  So you can create behaviors
for _this_ bunny, _all_ bunnies, or _all_ objects.

The other problem is that your users start pulling your models apart and
reparenting the subparts, and then your animation scripts start breaking
left and right.

In general, we've found that novice users expect semantic behaviors from
models, but in practice it's a Tough Problem (tm) if you don't want to
implement everything yourself for each new model.

But it would be nice.  =)

Jeff