Squeak multimedia potential vs. reality

Jeffrey T. Read bitwize at snet.net
Mon Dec 13 18:11:53 UTC 2004


Fellow Squeakers,

I have read the messages of others concerning Squeak's multimedia 
"promise" vs. what it is actually being used for. I think they raise 
some good points and Squeak isn't nearly what it could be. I'm one of 
those people who saw the multimedia aspects of Squeak and came to it 
for that purpose, when I opened it up I thought "Wow! There's so much 
good stuff in here! When will someone put it all together into 
something REALLY cool?" So Squeak to me is at the same time much more 
and much less than other multimedia programs.

Consider that animation is a very hot thing on the Web, yet Squeak has 
virtually no presence in this arena. It is nearly dominated instead by 
an awful little program called Macromedia Flash. In addition to 
hacking, I also draw comics and sometimes make the occasional 
animation. But it hasn't been since Autodesk Animator that I have found 
an animation program I actually liked. Squeak, as a complete 
programming environment with a fast graphical subsystem, has the 
potential to be far more powerful and capable than Flash ever was yet 
no one is doing anything with it in this regard.

Mind you, my purpose is not to turn Squeak into Flash, but rather to 
make things like "Homestar Runner" (a very popular and funny Web 
cartoon) possible in Squeak, in a manner that they really haven't been. 
My limited experience with Etoys suggests that while it is fine for the 
"drive-a-car demo",  the educational materials, and other such things, 
making complex character behavior is much more cumbersome. Making a 
character walk across the screen is one thing: making him walk across 
the screen, stop, turn to face the viewer and say a few words (with 
complete mouth movement) is quite another.

I'm working on something I like to call MorphAgents. These are like 
Players in the Etoy world but the difference is that you can write a 
"script" (which is currently an array of positions and/or actions, one 
per frame) for the morph to follow and when you send the agent the play 
message the morph will follow the script you wrote. It is actually a 
prototype for a similar agents system that I want to port to C++ for 
use in high speed games (making "cut scenes" and so forth).

What I want to know is how much wheel-reinventing will I be doing here? 
I see bits of what I want to accomplish in FlashSpriteMorph and other 
places. But is this like, really easy to do in Etoys and I am just not 
proficient enough with them yet?

--Jeff




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