On 02/07/06, Ron Teitelbaum Ron@usmedrec.com wrote:
How far did you get writing your own Etoy Tamagotchi's?
For my own 'stay ahead of the kids' learning I modelled my own fish tank, based on my experiences of keeping fish for all of two months. What I've found (in real life) is that over-feeding has been the cause of most of my fishly 'deletions', so I tried to make 'water quality' the most important factor. In my 'simulation' uneaten food pollutes the water, and over-fed fish (heavier than 28g) pollute the water too. The fish's health is directly affected by the water quality.
So... I was about to upload a copy of my file so you could see where I'm at... and found I didn't know where Squeak was storing its files. After some searching I found my squarium here: ~/Library/Preferences/Squeak/Internet/My Squeak/Squeaklets/aquarium16.001.pr
Preferences should really only hold preferences - I don't know if anyone here can pass this on to the right people, but might I suggest that a better place for Squeak to store its user files would be something like: ~/Documents/My Squeak/aquarium16.001.pr
Anyhow, I've uploaded my aquarium file to the school website: http://bradfordchristianschool.com/Squeakland - see 'Mr Kershaw's aquarium' near the bottom
I also found some useful documentation links there - how ironic is that, since I created that page myself several weeks ago?
Also I can't seem to get the mime-type correct in my .htaccess file. I've tried numerous variations on this theme, but to no avail:
AddType application/x-squeak-object .pr
so for now you'll have to download my fish and run them locally.
Regards how far we've got with the kids' Tamagotchi's/pet shop animals, lesson one (last Friday) consisted of:
1. Draw your rabbit / guinea pig / snake / lizard
2. Create a 'thirst' variable. Drag its tile to below your pet. Set it to 0
3. Drag out a script, call it 'live'
4. Drag a 'thirst' assignment tile, set it to 'thirst, increase by, 1'. Start the ticker. Reduce to 1 execution per second
5. Add a test to the script: thirst > 900. If yes, rotate pet by 90
I have this idea of getting a single pet 'maintainable' (if thirsty drink water if available, click water to replenish when empty) then creating siblings with slight random variations in drinking patterns, and having to keep a whole pet shop fed & watered. Not sure how I'm going to get there, but that's half the fun of teaching, right - to stay ahead of the kids? ;)
Are there any pre-built conditional loops I could use on my scripts? The if-then-else structure is fine, but a bit limiting.
Any/all help appreciated,
John.