Complex / Multiple Worlds in Alice

A group of advanced students want to work together on an RPG project. Their idea was to mimic (in a smaller scale) some common RPG games where a character or characters walk around, fight, interact with objects. I just wanted to check with the community whether certain problems were surmountable. And see if some of my ideas are credible.

1) Collaboration. I know that each student can work on their own objects / classes and import them into a world, so this shouldn't be a problem. This in itself will keep them busy for a while.

2) Multiple Worlds: To make an RPG work, they want to be able to visit multiple worlds. (Click on a building and go inside, reach the end of the screen and load a new world).
a) As far as I can tell there is no way to do this in Alice. Cross worlds / dynamically load another world.
b) I suppose I could get them to shrink all of the objects so that one world seems really big
c) The solution for going into things (buildings for ex). Might be to use the 3D nature of the world. Place invisible building interiors (like the dojo) way up in the sky, and "teleport" a character into it when needed.

Originally Posted by mikerd

Place invisible building interiors (like the dojo) way up in the sky, and "teleport" a character into it when needed.

One neat way to do something similar is to place two different environments at the same spot. Put all the objects, etc. in each in a list - have the first showing initially and then switch the first list to not showing and the second to showing when the "magic event" occurs. This gets around a lot of the corrrdinate problems with having different worlds at two locations - plus gives you some interesting options for the fade-in/fade-out step.

This doesn't solve the problem of importing a full environment for the second location - that setup still has to be done (as far as I know) manually - but that's not really to big a task, especially if some common coordinate references (door locations, etc.) have been set up in advance.

Very much not an original idea - but couldn't find the source with a quick search.

Thanks Jim,

I hadn't thought about using a list. They could probably handle that with a bit of extra help.

It's too bad one can't dynamically load a new world. You'd think it wouldn't be too hard to implement.

Mike.

Storytelling Alice Allows you to create multiple scenes (example: you've completed your first worlds looks actions... move on to a new blank landscape

I've always wanted to have it load a new world after you achieve something automatically. That way, it wouldn't lag (slow down) because the world is too big. But, sadly, I can't seem to find any solution to that problem; as a world in ALice can only deal with that world, and none other. But shrinking can be a great idea! It can really add on the gaming experience, with the world being much larger.

Is there a way to write program code (such as an event handler, for example) to cause the program to switch from one scene to another in StorytellingAlice?

I have to say I'm very reticent to use Storytelling Alice (though I appreciate the suggestion). Alice runtime errors are bad enough and I find 'Storytelling Alice' to be worse.

However, analyzing what Storytelling Alice does can help people using regular Alice figure out how to mimic multiple scenes / worlds. The tutorial world is made up of 3 scenes, but if you look at the world closely you'll see the scenes have just been placed one on top of the other (many many units above eachother, but you can see them if you rotate). That's what I ended up having my students do themselves last year.

So while I might not use Storytelling Alice, I do think it's a vast improvement, and gets me very excited to see a beta of Alice 3.0 sometime soon! [hint hint ]

Originally Posted by mikerd

So while I might not use Storytelling Alice, I do think it's a vast improvement, and gets me very excited to see a beta of Alice 3.0 sometime soon! [hint hint ]

Beta V3.0!!!!