"Jeffrey T. Read" bitwize@snet.net 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?

Cool to hear about this kind of work in Squeak. Take a look at Skeleton package on SqueakMap: http://map1.squeakfoundation.org/sm/package/cd5c7cce-5ee0-40f9-a9ed-86c5 4799b246

On Monday 13 December 2004 10:11 am, Jeffrey T. Read wrote:

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?

I don't think so.

When I was in Spain with Diego and Jose we talked a lot about this.

Our plan (on which we haven't done anything, unfortunately) was to try to tack together some existing bits for a proof-of-concept to see if would be adequate.

The idea was to use the PianoRollMorph (which is pretty much the only editable representation of time that we have) to trigger events in scripts, or to trigger other command-like actions.

We figured that these could include:

* 'run' or 'fire' actions on Morphs (like buttons, etc.) * 'fire' scripts on Etoy players * MenuItemMorphs dragged from menus * tiles representing the entries in the undo/redo list (which aren't currently viewable directly) * other command-like things as we discover them.

For instance, one possibility would be to be able to make a 'snapshot' of the positions and angles of all the morphs in a project and then have a tile represent that snapshot. By putting it into the timeline, it would be possible to script simple animation.

Of course, storyboarding tools of some sort would be good too.

I do think there is a tension between making Squeak/Etoys into an authoring system and using it for constructivist education. In an authoring system, you want to make common things easy to do, while in an educational system you want to make common things possible to do while learning.

Also, part of the problem is that there is no model of time yet in Etoys (there is tick rate and fires/tick, but no actual representation of time). I added a global clock for some simulation demos I did for Alan, but without a way to add time-synchronized event triggers it required polling every tick.

So having something clock-like that can trigger things is probably essential; for usability it also would be nice to have it in one place so you can see your animation.