squeakland April 2018

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2 participants
4 discussions

TimeLapse/How-To Slider (short video demo)
by Jeremy Landry 12 Apr '18

12 Apr '18

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWthhkw6j1c One of the things that the original Etoys team made clear was that they didn't want high quality graphics to discourage users from making their own. The idea was make them serviceable for the demo, but also make them 'bad' enough so anyone seeing it for the first time would have the feeling of "I can do better than that". Personally, I think going the opposite direction for graphics than the code (i.e. the codebase of etoys/smalltalk is ridiculously overwhelmingly 'good' compared to what I can code, for instance) doesn't make any sense when thinking about total consistency. Something like this could help improve people's ability to think about drawing. In this case, the scene is 1 point perspective and created using nothing but 'polygon' and 'circle' objects along with setting their fill and border properties such that they work together to create a solid image. Basically, the slider takes it's own value then then sets everything in the world on one side of that value to SHOW and everything else on the other side to HIDE. It has further use; being able to 'dig down' into things really far down in the drawing becomes difficult as you mix shapes...this slider can help quickly find a way to access a partially covered up shape to edit, or even add new shapes in between others.

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Etoys Club update video
by Jeremy Landry 08 Apr '18

08 Apr '18

If ticking sounds bother you abnormally more than normal people, then please turn down your sound before checking out the demonstration video because that's the only sound it makes (right now at this time, at least...) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v17MH0f-Z0k&feature=youtu.be Still working on this project. Because I'm such a stickler for completeness and making sure the project doesn't feel half-hearted, it's taking a lot longer than maybe it normally would. This video shows the current state of affairs. The missing text on the 'army dude walking around' screen happened after saving the project and right before I made this video. I don't know why it occurs and saving seems to break any page on the text-box book that it is open to. Is anyone aware of this happening to anyone else? It contains scripts to occur on opening the page and is a book inside of a book and talks to another book. I"m not sure that's how books were intended to be used, but I'm totally doing that.

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Just a quick thing
by Jeremy Landry 03 Apr '18

03 Apr '18

A couple of friends of mine were kicking around an idea of a 'space golf' game and to encourage them to follow through, I kicked together this super quick demo. https://youtu.be/NMuJszOORqo LIkely this will also end up in Etoys Club. It creates a starfield by copying a prototype and basically the 'stars' will loop using built in Etoys commands like Wrap under the movement category. The playfield is in a book, so I can hide the edges of it where wrap isn't 'pretty'. Then for hte planets, I set it up so that if you click them, they memorize their 'home' location to reset the level and they don't wrap. They all respond to an event called 'ScrollSpace' which is broadcast by the 'player's' sphere in the center of the screen. Basically, the planets are free to move forever inside of the playfield but the stars repeat, giving the impression that space and these stars go on forever, but as you can see at the bottom of the screen, there's only a limited number of stars in the playfield.

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Etoys Club Update
by Jeremy Landry 01 Apr '18

01 Apr '18

Hey, been working on consolidating a lot of demos I've been building the past 6 months into the final presentation. I had already built a 'framework' to put them in, but found out that I should build from the middle outward rather than the outward in, when it comes to presentation aspects and having something that's lean and loads/saves quickly (before I completely restarted what you see this afternoon, it took about 45 minutes to save a 12 MB file and reload to edit again...if you'r elike me and worried something could crash at any moment and save frequently as a result, this is no good!)... This also allowed me to really get to brass tacks about how to organize and set the feel of the project (which, if anyone is familiar with PC98 games, this stuff might feel familiar as that's how this project is largely being treated to really 'show off' what Etoys is good at rather than reminding people it can't make God of War III). Here's a couple of screenshots to check out or you can just grab the project that works on vanilla etoys 5. There's about 4 or 5 more demos to include and the first page will actually be the 'game' you use to explore the demos in a zelda-like map and RPG-like character interactions (there's a reason this format was chosen: the story is about a computer user who goes 'back to low-fidelia', fed up with modern computer normacy, such as DLC, data tracking, etc...they remember the castle in low-fidelia being super cool but for some reason the castle is locked, and so they go look for answers to get into it, but end up finding locals don't care or don't even notice the castle is closed because they're all super into doing cool stuff with Etoys...then in the final revelation, the 'game' kicks the 'player' back out to the default etoys home screen, except the car talks directly to the player, telling them the castle was always unlocked; you just had to right click it to explore it and that really, etoys is their castle and kingdom and world to build in any way they see fit and that the denizens of lowfidelia didn't care about the castle because they were busy making their own; the blacksmith makes tools because that's his thing he likes doing, the magician was interested in strange graphical tricks, and that there was no one making games because there's more to computing than games once you start taking control of them, etc. etc.) So that's the direction that's solidifying and things are coming together quite fast now that I've experienced (hopefully) most of the roadblocks of doing a larger scale project in Etoys. It's been quite a learning experience and despite some of the setbacks, Etoys does let you rebound and salvage things very quickly...again, everything you see was literally built today in about 8 hours, which included 'fixing' literally every script that came into it (for some reason Etoys wouldn't always properly duplicate relationships when a Playfield with variety of things into this project via dropping it into a project thumbnail), and the main screen graphics, formatting of the previously made demos is included in that time. I thought it would be days to get this far starting over, but nope...just a couple of hours. It taught me that at any point in time, whatever I'm working on should be considered a 'sketch' of the final product until I decide it works right; just like drawing, a good piece has a lot of 'crumpled paper' you normally don't see, all of the things tried before settling on the final picture; Etoys definitely works this way at least for me. Anyway, here's screenshots and the project for people who like them. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wS4dM4myEN0KEV8xVQHG0bZMWJpZTq2M/view?usp=… <--project (around 4MB) https://imgur.com/a/fWWaK <-- screenshots Thanks for checking it out and comments/ critique/issues welcome.

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squeakland April 2018