Hi Jeff,
Welcome to the beginners list!
I appreciate the fact that you are sticking with the problem. That in my opinion is the best way to learn. I didn't answer your question because I do not feel that I am an expert in Wonderland. If the question was something like how can I map a key to so some action that is pretty easy, IF that action is an isolated easily called method. Something like: Utilities garbageCollectAndReport. This is a class method and there is no instance that needs to be sent to.
If a key stroke needs to be captured and affect a running instance it is a bit more difficult to do but still very possible. The issue here is that there is a complicated event loop that needs to be tapped into but this would be very difficult to explain to someone with limited experience. The fact that you are using wonderland means that there is probably already a hook to do what you want so a complicated explanation of what I know will probably only confuse the matter and make things more difficult for you.
There are people on this list that have much more experience with Wonderland, but nobody that will answer your question within hours.
I would love to have Squeak be much more a pleasant experience for you. My suggestion is that you start slower and work on understanding basic concepts of Squeak. Do more tutorials; look into how some things work before trying to extend them.
Also a comment, starting with the assumption that people are not going to help you is discouraging to people who might. People are more likely to help people that work hard themselves and will benefit from the help and will appreciate that help. I think you have the work hard part down. You need to be a bit more appreciative of the effort and time that goes into helping you.
Now to your question: Matthias was right and he sent you to exactly the place you needed to go. I just loaded a 3.8 image and did the helicopter tutorial. I have to say it was great fun! Wonderland is a very nice piece of code and I can see that it would be fun to play with. The tutorial is fun but the concepts are not easy and how the authors did what they did is very clever but also difficult especially when you venture off the beaten path. You picked a hard place to start! That by itself can be very frustrating.
Here is your answer but the answer is not perfect. What I noticed is that the keys only have focus when the actor is under the mouse. There may be a way to make this work in the context of a world but I couldn't get it to work that way. The world does not appear to have a reactions collection, but there does seem to be a little hook in Scene that might have been intended to work that way. Again this is an advanced concept. I also tried adding a reaction to the ground to make it easier for this to work. The ground accepted the reaction but did not act on it. I added a reaction of [:event | self halt] but that did nothing so maybe background items like ground and sky don't quite work or don't respond to certain reactions the way other actors do. It makes sense that Wonderland might be written this way. If you added a right key press to multiple objects how is it supposed to know which item the key press should control. There could be a number of ways to fix this like adding an actor that is a control stick or something, then placing the mouse over the control stick would work the helicopter. (just a suggestion of where you might go from here)
Ok so here is the code:
helicopter addResponse: [:event |
event getMorphicEvent keyString = '<left>'
ifTrue: [helicopter move: #left].
event getMorphicEvent keyString = '<right>'
ifTrue: [helicopter move: #right].
] to: #keyPress
I hope that helps, welcome to the list and
Happy coding,
Ron Teitelbaum
President / Principal Software Engineer
US Medical Record Specialists
Ron@USMedRec.com
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From: beginners-bounces@lists.squeakfoundation.org [mailto:beginners-bounces@lists.squeakfoundation.org] On Behalf Of Jeff Sent: Wednesday, November 08, 2006 12:28 AM To: beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org Subject: [Newbies] Disappointed
I'm pretty disappointed with this list at the moment. My last post, "beginners questions" talked about how beginners often don't get their questions answered and pointed out that often when the experts see that an answer, ANY answer, was given they then assume the question was answered, so they don't offer anything more. Now I do appreciate Matthias's honest attempt to answer the question, so I don't want this to be misconstrued as an attack on him. But he obviously misread it. And, well, once people saw that the question of how to make a wonderland actor move in response to mouse clicks had been answered, I didn't get any more help. The question I asked was how to move a wonderland actor with the arrow keys, and I need to do that without the actor having the focus. Unfortunately, since it's been taking so many hours for the messages I've tried to send to get posted on here, (I think I had screwed up joining the list somehow, and redid it so hopefully that problem is solved), it took me a full day to get my question asked and now another full day to explain that the answer I got was to a different question. By the by, I've been spending about 10 hours a day for 5 days now trying to solve this problem. It's getting quite frustrating for me and making me want to give up on squeak. http://imgfarm.com/images/webmail/rt/img/img1017a1.gif