Translated Alice (unicode version)

[meirs]

Hello

I'm working on a Unicode version of Alice, translated to several languages, among them Spanish, Russian, Ethiopian, Hebrew, French, Italian, Arabic, and Yiddish (no joking). I just wanted to describe what I did in one thread, to where I can forward questions regarding Alice's i18n issues from other threads.

Main changes made:
* support for Unicode - both in code and in world format (that is, changed worlds format, thus not back compatible to Alice worlds, but included an import tool)
* added a rich scripting support using Mama programming language - this is a full object oriented language I've created few years ago, designed for teaching programming in mid-schools, where students can write code in their own mother tongue. With this scripting language you can really write free code within the editing area, and manipulate scene objects.
* added support for scenery and characters (improved StoryTellingAlice functionality)
* added tutorial editor tool for instructors
* added a movie export with audio (improved 2.2 functionality)
* added support for creating user standalone executables (under MS-Windows)
* many bug fixes (and probably introducing new ones
* and more

This version is not going to be open source, neither free, I'm planning to charge about 10 $USD for it, the minimal cost I thought would be tolerable by most students.

I had discussions with Alice team regarding the name given to this version - I really wanted to include the name "Alice" in it, since majority of it is Alice, created by the Alice team. But Alice's license forbids that (see this thread http://alice.org/community/showthrea...hlight=license). So currently, it is planned to be called "Mama" after the programming language integrated into Alice.

I don't know if Alice 2.0/2.2 development continues, if it does I would love to contribute many of the fixes I've made to future releases.

Meir