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 at 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