programing

[levi arnold]

About How long does it take to program all of the programing that the users use to program the images? in v2.0 did you have to draw all the charecters and then scan them into the program?

[Jabberwocky]

Development Time

Alice is essentially a 3D graphics engine, like you've said a program for making programs. As you saw in the answer to your last question, when you'd asked how long until version 3 would ready for download, it can take awhile to develop something like this (18 to 24 months for the new version).

Alice has been in development for quite some time. You can get a sense of it's history from the acknowledgements page, "The Alice project originally began while Randy Pausch was on the faculty at the University of Virginia Computer Science Department in the early 1990's. The project moved to Carnegie Mellon with Professor Pausch in 1997.

In 1999, Alice v2.0 began, and is completely new software, with the core of the new system written in Java."

Modeling

Your second question asks about the graphic models or characters in Alice. It sounds like you are thinking 2D instead of 3D. With 3D graphics you take not only width and height into account but depth also. You don't have to hand draw and then scan graphics. There are special programs made for creating these types of graphics.

Basically you create a skeleton or framework, to hold the art, called a wireframe. The art is then wrapped or painted onto the wireframe. Like you said when you mentioned drawing, you can use a flat, 2-dimensional drawing or blueprint as a guide when you create a 3D models wireframe. I can't do any of these subjects justice. Check out the links below as a start.

A few links from Wikipedia: Game Engine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_engine), 3D computer graphics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_modelling), Rendering (computer graphics) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendering_%28computer_graphics%29).

A few tutorials for modeling using 3D Studio:
Modelling a car using nurms (http://www.wide3d.no/tutorials/Car_nurms_01.htm) - Very good tutorial on the principals behind modeling a car.
Box modeling a car (http://www.wide3d.no/tutorials/Car_nurms_01.htm) - Box modeling the basic shape of a car.

Have fun!