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2855 discussions

Squeak/Morphic As A Candidate for a Doom Style Game Engine, Unrealistic?
by Cody Sevier 07 Mar '24

07 Mar '24

Hello Everyone, Firstly, this is my first message here, so please correct my etiquette if it is not appropriate, or if I am mailing the wrong list. I discovered smalltalk a few months back and i've been growing excited with use. I read through a few books like the squeak by example book and others. I now think it's time to take on a project of substance to really gain some experience. I was really impressed with the multimedia/liveness of squeak and the stepping system of morphic. I thought to myself that this would be a perfect environment for some game development and thats where my current professional skills are being used. Cursory research showed others with games projects, even some with 3d to my surprise. I suspect those 3d engines are using the FFI to bind to c libs to achieve acceptable performance. My desire would be to build a 2.5d rendering system inspired by the doom engine. I figured it might be a better candidate performance wise then a full 3d engine and since its a software render, entirely self contained. (im not interested in external bindings yet.) However, I discovered the FPSMorph when exploring and to my dismay saw my system running at 47 fps on average simply idling. My specs are pretty good, Intel© Core™ i7-8705G CPU @ 3.10GHz × 4. So I thought surely this is a stepping concern, perhaps they have limited it. I changed the update interval and was guaranteed no additional frames. Im going to dig in further to see if implementation details are the issue, but thought it might be a good idea to consult the experts in tandem. So, is morphic really that slow for everyone else? Im concerned that if I take on such a project it may never actually be usable beyond learning. Would anyone willing to share their experience doing games? Perhaps maybe bypassing morphic and using direct Form + BitBlt would be faster? Any advice, experience or wisdom would be greatly appreciated. Im more then okay with being told this wont work etc. Sorry for the long mail and thanks for the great system! Kind Regards, Cody Sevier

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DKIM signing fixed
by Taeumel, Marcel 09 Feb '24

09 Feb '24

Hi all -- Our admin volunteer Yannis (CC) fixed DKIM signing. Hooraaaay! Hopefully, more mail servers will now accept our list traffic again. :-) Best, Marcel

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Help with keyboard layout when typing a caret
by Ivan Reche 09 Jan '24

09 Jan '24

Hey there! Total newbie here. I'm playing with Squeak on my vacation and I've noticed that, whenever I try to type a caret (^), which I believe is core to using Smalltalk, Squeak will insert an interrogation mark (?) in its place. I believe it must be something related to keyboard layout, but I have no idea on how to troubleshoot and fix this. Here is a screenshot to show what's happening: [image: image.png] My keyboard layout works just fine on GNOME. Thanks in advance! My environment: OS: Linux (GNOME DE) Keyboard layout: Portuguese ABNT2 Squeak version: Squeak6.0-22104-64bit-202206021410-Linux-x64

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how to scan files and folders
by ruivianapereira＠gmail.com 29 Oct '23

29 Oct '23

I'm not a programmer of any kind or language; I'm an amateur. I have a personal digital library with thousands of documents, which are useless unless I manage to classify them. I thought it would be an easy task with Squeak, since it is a quite simple problem, but I'm lacking some solutions, as a beginner. My general cenario: I made a class, lets call it card, to hold information about each work, each author, their location on disk and the relations between authors and works: Object>>#Card (instance var : name, location, notes, tags ... ) >>Author >> Work Object>>#MyLibrary (instance var : authors <aCollection>, works <aCollection>, myLibraryBase <aPath?>) Than I initialize #MyLibrary instances with a UIManager directoryChooser to establish from the begining a reference to the directory where all the relevant files are. But, because it is thousands of files, I would need an automatic method to «scan» all the relevant files in the directories and subdirectories. Meaning: the method should make a collection of all the files, recursively in subdirectories, and for each one it should create a card. And that's where I got stuck: how do I scan recursively the subdirectories? Most of the new tools are quite confusing for me, namely classes and tools to deal with files. Can anyone point me in the wright direction, please? Thanks

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Squeak Books
by Andrew Goh 22 Oct '23

22 Oct '23

Hi Squeak Foundation, I believe the Squeak language is similar to Visual Basic and Delphi in that it is a event-oriented programming language However, I notice that there is a shortfall in the number of Squeak books when compared to the Pharo language. Perhaps, more tutorials should be written on exploiting Squeak. Regards, --- Andrew Goh

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FreeBSD VM
by David Gray 31 Aug '23

31 Aug '23

Finally managed to carve out some time to try this again. It looks like a few people have been looking into to this in the meantime (thanks a lot) and even though I can’t follow exactly what has been changed etc I can report that when I clone the latest opensmalltalk-vm I can get a working system. I can open a workspace and Try a few tests with no crashes: (10**22) sin -0.8522008497671888 fib := [ :n | n > 2 ifTrue: [(fib value: n-2) + (fib value: n-1)] ifFalse: [1]]. "closure on block variable" fib value: 30. 832040 | x t | x := #(30 36 42 54 66 69). [1 to: 6 do: [:a | Transcript show: (Time millisecondsToRun: [t := (fib value: (x at: a))]). Transcript show: ' '. Transcript show: t. Transcript cr. ] ] forkAt: Processor userBackgroundPriority. 1081502 / 1000 / 60.0 18.025033333333333 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10 55 Time durationToRun: [fib value: 42] 0:00:00:03.406797 2+2 4 I installed a clean FreeBSD 13 release. I used a minimal install for org and a simple wm: openbox Then did a git clone of: https://github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm <https://github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm> I changed the shell to bash then did: ./scripts/updateSCCSVersions Then I changed to opensmalltalk-vm/building/linux64x64/squeak.cog.spur/build Ran: ./mvm Down loaded the latest Squeak6.0-22104-64bit.image & .changes and renamed them in the dir to squeak.image & squeak.changes. I copied the SqueakV60.sources here too. ./squeak ran. I accepted all the defaults for configure & then installed system updates, FFI, and OS system. And that’s it.

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Question re parsing in early Smalltalks
by Hugo Saavedra 30 Aug '23

30 Aug '23

Hi there, I've been writing an evaluator for a toy Smalltalk-like language, and reading the paper "The Evolution of Smalltalk" by Dan Ingalls which discusses the history from ST-72 to Squeak to get a better understanding of how STs worked under the hood. My understanding from this paper (mainly, pages 4-6) and others is that in early implementations, objects were responsible for the evaluation of their own messages in a fairly low level sense That is, ST-72 programs were first parsed in a sort of pre-processing step -- in such a way where objects could be initialized and differentiated from the tokens representing their messages. Then the messages as raw token streams were parsed into ASTs by the objects themselves, which then interpreted them. Is this actually how it worked? It makes sense to me that it would work in this way -- I was thinking when writing a parser for my toy Smalltalk that the parser should probably be fairly ignorant about the nature of the messages it parses, outside of being able to distinguish selectors and arguments, and binary messages vs keyword vs unary messages. In particular it probably does not know anything about precedence rules, since that would violate encapsulation and modularity -- e.g. in 3 + 2*4, it should be whatever method is invoked by the + selector that determines what happens to the tokens 2*3 rather than the parser -- i.e. whether we add 2 first and then multiply the sum by 3, or perform the multiplication and then add the product as in standard arithmetic. But it also seems like this would force developers to mix tedious parsing code with domain code, which feels kind of messy. I would really appreciate any clarification on this -- apologies if this is the wrong list for this sort of question, I'm very new to the community Thank you

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[ANN] Squeak by Example Edition 6.0 released
by christoph.thiede＠student.hpi.uni-potsdam.de 21 Jul '23

21 Jul '23

Hi all! We are happy to announce a new edition of the Squeak by Example book today! --> Order the colored paperback: https://www.lulu.com/shop/patrick-rein-and-christoph-thiede/squeak-by-examp… --> Download as free PDF: https://github.com/hpi-swa-lab/SqueakByExample-english/releases/download/6.… Squeak by Example is an introductory book about the Squeak/Smalltalk programming language and environment, guiding students and developers through the environment, language, tools, and the Morphic framework by means of a series of examples and exercises. The new 6.0 edition includes the following highlights: * Complements the Squeak 6.0 release * High-resolution screenshots * New chapter about source control tools * Covers several additional tools (such as the package pane browser, breakpoints, profiling tools, and more) * Extends description of several classes and protocols (Collections, Exceptions, copying, literals, and more) * Extends description of several tools (debugger, inspector, and search tools) * Updates code examples and makes them available on SqueakSource * Updates FAQs and links to further resources * Various improvements throughout the book (revised index, improved screenshots, fine-tuned layout & typography, ... thanks to all our attentive reviewers!) We hope you enjoy reading this book! SBE is a free and open book and is maintained on GitHub [1], so any kind of contribution (errata, improvements, new contents, etc.) is most welcome - just file an issue or drop us an email. Happy Squeaking! Best, Patrick and Christoph [1] https://github.com/hpi-swa-lab/SqueakByExample-english --- Sent from Squeak Inbox Talk

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Re: [squeak-dev] Re: [ANN] Squeak by Example Edition 6.0 released
by David T. Lewis 21 Jul '23

21 Jul '23

On Thu, Jul 20, 2023 at 03:14:57PM -0700, Tim Rowledge wrote: > > > On 2023-07-20, at 2:45 PM, christoph.thiede(a)student.hpi.uni-potsdam.de wrote: > > > > Hi all! > > > > We are happy to announce a new edition of the Squeak by Example book today! > > Nicely done; thank you everyone that has contributed. > Very nicely done indeed, thanks for doing this. I particularly enjoy reading the "Chapter summary" sections, I still find myself learning or relearning something each time I do that. Dave

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Specifying method names in Squeak 6.0
by lcuff2＠yahoo.com 02 Jul '23

02 Jul '23

I'm following the instructions in Squeak By Example (SBE), edition 5.3. On page 32 it gives code for SBECell initialize. When I type the exact code (excerpted below) It turns everything after the »red. When I accept it, I get "Nothing more expected". If I delete the "» initialize", it gets syntax colored and looks valid, but the method name is no longer initialize. Is this a change from Squeak 5.3 to 6.0. Should I download Squeak 5.3 in order to use the SBE book? SBECell»initialize super initialize. self label: ''; borderWidth: 2; bounds: (0 @ 0 corner: 16 @ 16); offColor: Color cantaloupe; onColor: Color aqua; useSquareCorners. self turnOff.

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Beginners