pointOfView properties

I don't know of a good place for Alice documentation. In particular, I am trying to figure out what the last property of pointOfView is. I would also like to verify that the orientation property gives an offset from the orientation of the world.

Thanks,

Tamara

Originally Posted by tamara

I don't know of a good place for Alice documentation. In particular, I am trying to figure out what the last property of pointOfView is. I would also like to verify that the orientation property gives an offset from the orientation of the world.

Thanks,

Tamara

I have been holding off hoping that someone would provide a positive response to your query. Since no one has, I will chime in.

In my opinion, the greatest weakness of Alice has nothing to do with what you can and cannot do using Alice. All programming languages have their strengths and weaknesses. When we commit to using a particular language, we are agreeing to work under those constraints.

The greatest weakness in Alice is the difficulty of determining what you can and cannot do using Alice. To my knowledge, there is no Alice documentation. Short of several published textbooks, the closest thing to documentation is Appendix A of my free online Alice programming tutorials that you will find at http://www.dickbaldwin.com/tocalice.htm The material in that appendix is the result of experimentation on my part and falls far short of what I would consider to be adequate documentation for a programming environment. However, it is better than nothing.

Dick Baldwin
Free Alice tutorials: http://www.dickbaldwin.com/tocalice.htm
Free programming tutorials: http://www.dickbaldwin.com/toc.htm

Has anybody thought about creating an Alice wiki for documentation, code sharing, and design advice? I think it would be a great thing for my students to contribute to, and it would be a big help for all developers, rather than searching through threads for information. An instructor's section with projects would also be really helpful. (I already got one final project idea from reading this discussion group.) Dick, you've obviously already worked very hard on documenting Alice and all of the above, what do you think?

Originally Posted by Maggie

Has anybody thought about creating an Alice wiki for documentation, code sharing, and design advice? I think it would be a great thing for my students to contribute to, and it would be a big help for all developers, rather than searching through threads for information. An instructor's section with projects would also be really helpful. (I already got one final project idea from reading this discussion group.) Dick, you've obviously already worked very hard on documenting Alice and all of the above, what do you think?

My only experience with wikis is frequently visiting Wikopedia.com to look up information. Therefore, I don't know what would be involved in supporting an Alice wiki, but I would have appreciated the availability of a good one in the months before teaching my first Alice course.

One thing that would concern me would be the possible publication of incorrect or unreliable information. We see some of that from time to time on this forum and I don't know what the quality-control aspect of a wiki is.

For example, see Scarlet's recent posting involving a question on collision detection (titled something about four questions) where she points out an error in an earlier posting by someone else on collision detection.

Dick Baldwin
Free Alice tutorials: http://www.dickbaldwin.com/tocalice.htm
Free programming tutorials: http://www.dickbaldwin.com/toc.htm