Alan Kay wrote:
Bob and Karl --
One suggestion is to always use "increaseBy" (found by clicking on the carets in the "<-" tile).
Found it. Lots of power under the hood here. I also located the dot menu, thanks Joshua.
This allows you to say:
ship's x increaseBy ship's velocityx
instead of
ship's x <- ship's x + ship's velocityx
The former illuminates the accumulation, and also gives the kids the term "increaseBy" as the name for a very powerful idea, that can be used in animation (holder's cursor increaseBy 1), sampling synthesis (same expression), etc. Two levels of this gives a nice way to think about accelleration (in the spatial world) and about FM synthesis (in the acoustic world).
This sounds cool. It could be like a mission control center and have lots of related data presented, and possibilites to remote control the ship that way.
It is also worthwhile to go further in making programs like this understandable, e.g. it's pretty easy to use a player on a small playfield to show the direction and magnitude of the velocity and accelleration -- that is, we are now using a player on its own playfield (set the preference under the playfield's menu to "0 at center", etc.) as a vector value that can display itself. Then you can take the increments for moving the ship from these vector values, etc., AND the kid can see the dynamic state of the ship.
With the right kind of wraparound, an "F = ma" game like this will work pretty well when shared over the net ....
The first addon modifications at MIT were, first, the starfield (slowly rotating as I recall ...?), and then a sun to add a little inverse square law to the fun. These can be done geometrically without introducing Trig as a direct concept (heh heh). Bob and I did several versions of a sun and a planet in the Etoy system, and I think at least one of these is on his "SuperSwiki".....
Yes I had a look at it. I'm still just in the starting faces with the scripting system, but it is really powerfull. It has a quite stiff learing curve but it's also rewarding in flexibility and power. I find myself going: aha, that's how it's done ! every ten minutes.
Karl
Cheers,
Alan
At 11:12 AM -0500 12/26/00, Bob Arning wrote:
On Tue, 26 Dec 2000 13:44:59 +0100 Karl Ramberg karl.ramberg@chello.se wrote:
Anyway, the project is at Bobs SuperSwiki, http://209.143.91.36/super/ , it's called SpaceWar. Best accessed with a 2.9a image and either the FileList or the ProjectNavigatorMorphs Find button. It would be cool if you or anybody messed around with it :-) There is lots of issues about the scripting I don't know about, and I find the easiest way to learn is to seeing how it's done.
Karl,
I suspect we are all in a learning mode here. I put a modified version out as SpaceWarBob. See if you find any of it an improvement. ;-)
Cheers, Bob
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