"Jeffrey T. Read" <bitwize at 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