Alice 2.2 Beta Update

About:

Alice 2.2 has been updated but is still in beta status. Although many bugs have been fixed, performance of the video export feature is still somewhat variant with different graphics adapters and different versions of QuickTime. If you plan on using it for teaching a course, please be sure to test it out thoroughly on your computer system(s) prior to beginning the course.

Downloads (updated 01/16/2009):

Alice 2.2 for Windows (150MB)

Alice 2.2 for Windows with Learning to Program with Alice textbook worlds (185MB)

Alice 2.2 for Mac (126MB)

Alice 2.2 for Mac with Learning to Program with Alice textbook worlds (162MB)

Changes:

The main differences between Alice 2.2 and its predecessor, Alice 2.0 are:

Alice 2.2 for Windows:

• Functional video exporter
• Built-in walk animation/methods for 20+ humanoid characters
• Rendering engine choice of Java OpenGL (JOGL) or DirectX
• Random number function for integers fixed
• Ability to change location where Alice stores its preferences -- for those on networked or permission-deprived machines
• Bug submission button removed, due to broken database

Alice 2.2 for Mac:

• List of changes not yet available

Alice 2.2 for Linux not available

What is broken?

Alice 2.2 is still in beta and has not been tested thoroughly. As such, there are a number of bugs that have been introduced that we are working on fixing. Among these are:

• Video exporting performance varies by machine, graphics adapters, and QuickTime versions.
• Sound causes major issues. We recommend using only one or two sound clips and using mp3 format.

Guide:

We have written a short document with some helpful info to get you started with Alice 2.2 and exporting video:

Guide to Alice 2.2 and creating video

Using Alice on a networked machine:

Alice 2.0 compatibility with networked machines has been hit-or-miss. This was due to the Alice preferences file location being hard-coded as:

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\.alice

In cases where the user's home directory was not on the C drive or in a different path, Alice would throw up a gallery viewer error and possibly prevent the user from accessing Alice.

We have modified Alice 2.2 to allow the user to enter in the path to a writable directory on any drive, networked or local. This can be done by opening up the following file in a text editor:

Alice 2.2\Required\etc\version.txt

It should look like this:

2.2 9/1/2008
0x7F8AD1

Add a new line at the bottom and enter in the *full* path to where you would like the preferences stored. This will need to be a writable directory. Do not use quotes. For example, if I wanted to change the location to my desktop on drive E, I would do the following:

2.2 9/1/2008
0x7F8AD1
E:\Documents and Settings\gabe\Desktop

Save the file and close it. If Alice is running, make sure to shut it down and restart. To confirm it is working, navigate to the directory you typed above and you should see a .alice2 directory. If you do not see one, make sure hidden directories are viewable.

If you discover new bugs that are in 2.2, please let us know! Make sure to be as detailed as possible, and indicate the OS you are using, as well as whether this bug is new to 2.2 or in both 2.2 and 2.0. We will be working on getting this release as stable as we can, but we need your feedback! Feature-wise, we don't have plans to introduce any additional functionality prior to 3.0, but we will do our best to fix major bugs. Thank you in advance for your help and patience!