hehe
12-05-2007, 10:17 AM
Inspired by Randy Pausch's speech, I started to teach my kids Alice. But first, I had to learn it myself. And in doing that, I found these bugs. I searched this forum and have not seen any of them reported.
1. In ST Alice, some characters can walk, etc., but when they do, they all of a sudden drop to "ground level". Imaging the characters on a castle bridge, high from the ground. If you tell one to walk or straighten up, it essentially disappears.
2. For the "magician" character in ST Alice, at least, if you ask it to say something, the words seem to come out of the apparent center of the object. As an example, imagine her one arm is outstretched to the right. The place where the "say" bubble comes out seems to be below her outstretched arm, instead of her mouth!
3. In a reloaded world, if a character/object is added in scene 2, the listing appears in the global branch (default for scene 1).
4. In the PictureFrame object, if one changes the texture map of the matte, which is a reasonable place to insert a picture of one's own choosing, only a small portion of the picture is shown, and this small portion (about 1/2 x 1/3 the original size, assuming the aspect ratio is right) is not even centered!
5. The font sizes seem to be absolute. So if one changes the player size setting, the words will not be displayed the same way. This seem to apply to both the subtitle and say/think strings.
6. I don't know whether there is a better way to do this, but if I do a while (not var1) {do nothing;} Alice hangs. The reason for this construct is so that a main story line can wait for some key/mouse action to change the var1 value, before moving on. I know this is an obvious dead loop in conventional programming. But because Alice is designed to run many things in parallel (no?), with built-in do-together support, etc., I was hoping for some magic.
7. Alice seems to be afraid of complexity. I had a knight holding a sword in his right hand in scene 1. In scene 3 this is not possible any more. The best I can do is to use his right upper arm as the vehicle for the sword.
8. Differentiation between functions and methods. I'd like to have a boolean function to do these things: (a) ask (through an on-screen character) a question; (b) display the yes/no buttons; (c) give some visual feedback when one of the buttons are clicked; (d) hide the yes/no buttons; (e) return the answer. But apparently this cannot be done. Some of these statements (I forgot which one) cannot be in a function, apparently. This is contrary to the common structures of most, if not all, modern computer languages.
9. Mismatched functions and methods. In ST Alice I can get the position and orientation of a character, but I cannot find a way to make use of these, such as returning a character to a known position to repeat a scene.
I'd be happy to give more detailed descriptions if anyone find one of these hard to duplicate.
Thanks for reading and best wishes.
(BTW, is the "Sharing Worlds" forum the right place to share ST Alice stories? Mine contain no object/world of my own, 'cause I don't have the tools to make them.)
1. In ST Alice, some characters can walk, etc., but when they do, they all of a sudden drop to "ground level". Imaging the characters on a castle bridge, high from the ground. If you tell one to walk or straighten up, it essentially disappears.
2. For the "magician" character in ST Alice, at least, if you ask it to say something, the words seem to come out of the apparent center of the object. As an example, imagine her one arm is outstretched to the right. The place where the "say" bubble comes out seems to be below her outstretched arm, instead of her mouth!
3. In a reloaded world, if a character/object is added in scene 2, the listing appears in the global branch (default for scene 1).
4. In the PictureFrame object, if one changes the texture map of the matte, which is a reasonable place to insert a picture of one's own choosing, only a small portion of the picture is shown, and this small portion (about 1/2 x 1/3 the original size, assuming the aspect ratio is right) is not even centered!
5. The font sizes seem to be absolute. So if one changes the player size setting, the words will not be displayed the same way. This seem to apply to both the subtitle and say/think strings.
6. I don't know whether there is a better way to do this, but if I do a while (not var1) {do nothing;} Alice hangs. The reason for this construct is so that a main story line can wait for some key/mouse action to change the var1 value, before moving on. I know this is an obvious dead loop in conventional programming. But because Alice is designed to run many things in parallel (no?), with built-in do-together support, etc., I was hoping for some magic.
7. Alice seems to be afraid of complexity. I had a knight holding a sword in his right hand in scene 1. In scene 3 this is not possible any more. The best I can do is to use his right upper arm as the vehicle for the sword.
8. Differentiation between functions and methods. I'd like to have a boolean function to do these things: (a) ask (through an on-screen character) a question; (b) display the yes/no buttons; (c) give some visual feedback when one of the buttons are clicked; (d) hide the yes/no buttons; (e) return the answer. But apparently this cannot be done. Some of these statements (I forgot which one) cannot be in a function, apparently. This is contrary to the common structures of most, if not all, modern computer languages.
9. Mismatched functions and methods. In ST Alice I can get the position and orientation of a character, but I cannot find a way to make use of these, such as returning a character to a known position to repeat a scene.
I'd be happy to give more detailed descriptions if anyone find one of these hard to duplicate.
Thanks for reading and best wishes.
(BTW, is the "Sharing Worlds" forum the right place to share ST Alice stories? Mine contain no object/world of my own, 'cause I don't have the tools to make them.)