What's with the scripting area? I'm playing with 3.0final, 2 processor PC, Win 2k sp2. I've been clicking on the scripting-area thing in the "tools", dragging left, and it just sits there unresponsive, unmoveable, un-anything. It did this before, but I thought I had messed something up with all my poking and clicking, so I started fresh. I thought this was where I was supposed to go and play. What am I missing?
David Chase
On Sunday 31 March 2002 07:08 pm, David Chase wrote:
What's with the scripting area? I'm playing with 3.0final, 2 processor PC, Win 2k sp2. I've been clicking on the scripting-area thing in the "tools", dragging left, and it just sits there unresponsive, unmoveable, un-anything. It did this before, but I thought I had messed something up with all my poking and clicking, so I started fresh. I thought this was where I was supposed to go and play. What am I missing?
David Chase
I haven't been able to figure out what that's for either. Perhaps one of the eToy experts here could help. But my impressions so far:
Basically, it's the same kind of thing as the World itself. I _think_ (though am not sure) that it doesn't really provide any capabilities that you _need_ for scripting. Though you can collapse the whole thing, size it, or move it about. This may be useful for you. Scripting is just as easy without it. I'd explore scripting without using it (I'd use a new Project instead for organizing related Morphs and their scripts). Maybe Alan or Ted could explain what it's for.
You can drag it around using the Morph halos (right button or Alt/click or Cmd/click). Or when the halos are up (you can alt/drag or right-button drag).
Depending on your VM preferences, the right/middle buttons may be swapped (see the Windows Window (system?) menu at the top left of the Squeak window frame).
Any Morph can have its halo brought up this way. The various handles (buttons) in the halo do different things. One of them (the light blue eyeball) brings up a viewer on the Morph, which is the entry to the scripting.
Others bring up menus, delete the Morph, rotate it, etc.
One of them (the orange rectangle one) gives you a tile that you can use in scripts to refer to that Morph (from other Morphs' scripts).
And, of course, the World itself is a Morph; you can bring up a viewer on it as well.
The "scripting area" is a bit of a relic from the early days of Etoys. As such, it hardly deserves much mindshare, and the only reason why we continue to make it available is because of its ability to support localized stop-step-go-button complexes -- see item c below.
Aiming at quite young children, we were attempting to streamline several important steps in the etoy construction process, and some of those configuration choices are still embodied in the "scripting areas," including:
(a) After the user finishes painting a new object in the pale-green playfield, its Viewer is automatically put up. (Initiate such a painting by grabbing a paint-palette-icon from the Supplies flap and dropping it over the pale-green playfield.)
(b) When the mouse moves over an object on that playfield, halos are automatically put up for it.
(c) Its stop/step/go buttons govern only the running of scripts belonging to objects within the scripting area.
(d) It comes ready-made with a trash-can.
(e) Viewers appear at the right edge of the scripting area, rather than at the right edge of the screen.
If you had for example two or more different simulations that you wanted independent control over on the same screen (e.g. sometimes running only one, sometimes another one, sometimes both concurrently, sometimes neither,) you could organize each of them into a separate scripting area; you could then control the stop-step-go status of each of them separately. And you could move entire simulations around on the screen, and store each of them in a file independently of the others at a granularity finer than a Project.
Unless you have a particular need for multiple independent stop/step/go domains (an effect that would be quite tricky to obtain otherwise,) I think you'd be wise to follow Ned's advice and just go with exploring scripting in a vanilla morphic project.
Hope this helps,
-- Scott
PS: Nobody ever expected that the early scripting work (and it's *all* still "early") would be self-explanatory. Users need to be "scaffolded" -- by sitting on a parent's lap, or learning it as part of a school curriculum, or learning it from another child who already knows it; and in any case, examples and tutorials are assumed to be essential pieces of the process. Check out the Squeakland site for at least some taste of this kind of material.
At 7:38 PM -0800 3/31/02, Ned Konz wrote:
On Sunday 31 March 2002 07:08 pm, David Chase wrote:
What's with the scripting area? I'm playing with 3.0final, 2 processor PC, Win 2k sp2. I've been clicking on the scripting-area thing in the "tools", dragging left, and it just sits there unresponsive, unmoveable, un-anything. It did this before, but I thought I had messed something up with all my poking and clicking, so I started fresh. I thought this was where I was supposed to go and play. What am I missing?
David Chase
I haven't been able to figure out what that's for either. Perhaps one of the eToy experts here could help. But my impressions so far:
Basically, it's the same kind of thing as the World itself. I _think_ (though am not sure) that it doesn't really provide any capabilities that you _need_ for scripting. Though you can collapse the whole thing, size it, or move it about. This may be useful for you. Scripting is just as easy without it. I'd explore scripting without using it (I'd use a new Project instead for organizing related Morphs and their scripts). Maybe Alan or Ted could explain what it's for.
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