Where did I see all those properties?

Dear hgs,

That must be it! I must have right-clicked. I'm not experienced at all, I didn't know about right-clicking. My experience is limited to the two texts I've read and the few programs I've written to get used to the environment, and I don't believe either text mentions right-clicking.

However, I tried right-clicking around on your suggestion, and I found one spot where I got a "change to" menu that only gave me two options, but it gave me the options of <<<subject's width>>> and <<<subject's depth>>>. (I was setting a number variable to armchair's height.)

Those angle brackets ring a little bell in my head.

Now I must just keep trying that until I get the huge list. I don't remember what I was working on when I got the huge list. Posting on this forum to find out if anybody knew what I'd seen was also set aside to "do later." I've generated quite a lot of Alice code, I don't think I'd like to go right-clicking on everything! But I'm going to try it every chance I get, and when I find the huge list of properties, I'll post the exact code here.

Thank you so very much for the employment of the little gray cells, "h"ercule "g s" Poirot!

Maggie

Originally Posted by hgs

The only times I've been surprised by seeing lots of properties were when I discovered/noticed the "more..." option at the end of some methods, and that it was right-clickable, ...

Just for clarification, I may be wrong, but as near as I can tell, unlike many items in Windows, there is no difference between right-clicking and left-clicking the "more..." option in Alice. Clicking the word "more..." with either the right or the left mouse button produces exactly the same result as clicking the little triangle to the right of the word "more..." with either mouse button.

Also, this is probably picking at nits, but I would tend to call the menu items (exposed by such clicking) parameters instead of properties. I view these items as hidden parameters that have default values. Clicking and exposing the various menus makes it possible for the programmer to change the default parameter values to values of the programmer's choice.

Dear Dick,

Yes, you're right, it isn't right-clicking the "more" that makes anything new come up, and you're definitely assigning arguments to parameters when you do that. Agreed.

However, sometimes if you right-click on the actual method, you get a "change to" option that allows you to pick a different method. I believe the list of properties that I saw looked something like that, but I'll be darned if I can find it again. I've been right-clicking like crazy.

And my text does mention right-clicking, but it's in the context of changing certain events to others -- just to set the record straight on my text. :-)

Maggie

Maggie

That is very interesting. Although I have used the right-click option many times to delete, disable, enable, and copy statements or blocks of code, I never noticed the changeTo item on the menu before.

I just tried it on all of the methods for a Penguin object. The only methods that provide this option are turn, roll, turnAtSpeed, and rollAtSpeed. When you select changeTo on either of the turn methods, you can change it to a roll method, and vice versa. I suppose this is because it is very common for students to select turn when they should select roll and to select roll when they should select turn. This makes it easy to correct the mistake.

Thanks for pointing this out. I will further point it out to my students who can use all of the help that they can get.

Dick Baldwin

Dear Dick,

There are other places that it works too. For example, you can change some parameters, such as <<<subject's height>>> to <<<subject's width>>> or <<<subject's depth>>>. So certain parameters are substitutable as well. I'm relatively certain that it must have been a parameter that I right-clicked, and instead of getting just a few substitutions, I got an entire list of stuff I'd never seen before. Argh! It's like a dream! I wish I could find it again.

Maggie

Maggie,

This is just a shot in the dark, but is there any chance that what you saw was the list of Other types that can be exposed when you click the button to create a new variable or a new parameter. Although they are types and not properties, some of them have names that might lead one to think that they are properties, such as:

Color
TextureMap
Sound
Pose
Position
Orientation
PointOfView
Transformsble
Direction

Dick Baldwin

No, that wasn't what I saw. I'll keep looking.

Maybe some of you have seen them before. Here's how I got them:

I created a list of items, the list is called "itemsToSell." (I was doing a flea market game.) When an item is sold, I want to remove it from the list. So I created the following code:

remove item from position (first index of blender from vendor.itemsToSell) of vendor.itemsToSell;

Then I dragged that code up to the clipboard, and dragged it back in for when the user wants to buy the teddy bear. I dragged the teddy bear tile from the object tree in to replace blender, above.

When I did, I got a pop-up menu, image inserted below (I hope, I've never inserted an image before, I hope it works).

Now, I wanted to see what some of those things are, so I chose "teddybear.questions." I put a print under the statement, dragged in "what as a string," and then dragged in teddybear.questions. Well, teddybear.questions turns out to be "None." A little disappointing, but fun that I can do that. I may try out some others, but I'm actually trying to prep my class for tomorrow, so I probably won't. If anybody discovers anything interesting, please let me know!!

Maggie

Some of those properties are extremely interesting and I would like to experiment with them. Is there any chance that you can figure out a way to expose them with simpler code?

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

Just out of curiosity, I compared Maggie's list of properties with the list of properties normally available for objects from the gallery. For whatever it's worth:

Available on the Properties panel but not in the list:
pointOfView
isFirstClass

On the list but not available on the Properties panel:
name
data
script
responses
behaviors
variables
questions
geometries
misc
parts
poses
localTransformation
ambientColor
emissiveColorMap
specularHighlightColorMap
bumpMap
detailMap
interactionMap
visualScale
disabledAffectors
geometry

My guess is that the developers of Alice never wanted us to be able to manipulate these properties directly and the fact that you were able to expose them is a bug in the system, but I may be wrong.

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