Squeak multimedia potential vs. reality

stéphane ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Mon Dec 13 19:16:22 UTC 2004


Hi jeffrey

I think that this would be really nice to have a flash open source 
called SqueakFlash :)
May be we should look at Tweak and build on top of that. 
http://www.impara.de/tweak/tcar
There is also the Tk4 project that I really hope will be successful.

Stef

On 13 déc. 04, at 19:11, Jeffrey T. Read wrote:

> 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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