[Squeakland] drive-a-car newbie questions

[Andreas Raab]

Hi Randy,

"forward by N" means precisely what it says - it moves the object forward by
the specified distance. You can see that if you click on the exclamation
mark in the viewer. It is possible to treat it is a measure of speed by
setting a script to ticking, effectively specifying that "each tick we move
by delta" and naturally, given the values for "tick" and "delta" we can
compute the speed by dividing tick into delta and we can influence the speed
by changing either tick or delta (for changing the "tick" you can
click-and-hold on the little clock in the script; it will show you a little
menu where you can choose how fast this script should be ticking).

I think that this will also answer your original question - there is no need
to "stop" the object after travelling the specified distance. You can just
have it travel the distance directly.

Cheers,
  - Andreas

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Randy Heiland" <heiland at indiana.edu>
To: "'Squeakland'" <squeakland at squeakland.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2004 12:05 PM
Subject: [Squeakland] drive-a-car newbie questions


> Hello,
>
> I'm going to swallow my pride and ask the list... I just finished the
> drive-a-car (Proj 2) in "Powerful Ideas..." and at the end, after I've
> built the script to have the car turn in circles, I see the "Challenge"
> sidebar with the various geometric shapes.  But I have no idea how to
> make a simple square.  I don't believe I've learned anything up to this
> point that tells me how to "stop after traveling distance X" (so I can
> change my heading).  The geometric shapes would seem to involve
> conditionals.  Please enlighten this "professional" programmer :)
> Related, is there a searchable archive for the Squeakland list? (I found
> the raw archive)
>
> Also, just some newbie feedback, the term "forward by N" seems a bit
> confusing.  It really is "speed", isn't it?  And if so, wouldn't every
> 1st-grader on understand the concept of speed?
>
> thanks, Randy
>
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