Take Picture button in Alice 2.3
 

The "Take Picture" button in the latest release of Alice 2.3 has been removed.

By way of explanation, this was not an arbitrary decision. The problem is that the built-in "Take a Picture" in Alice 2 was created using Direct X for the PC. Therefore, it doesn't work for Mac users and recent updates of Direct X cause problems on newer systems (Vista, Windows 7, and now Windows 8).

Therefore, we have had a increasing number of complaints and that has led to disabling the feature and asking people to simply use whatever screen capture they have on their computer. See the following links:

For Windows
[url]http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Take-a-screen-capture-print-screen[/url]

For OS X
[url]http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/screencapturemac/ht/macscreenshot.htm[/url]

I don't mean to sound rude, but why would people care if it was taken out? I don't think anyone has ever used it.

Take picture
 

Actually, you would be surprised... It is actually used in a lot of courses, and I have received many questions about it...

Hmmm... Maybe I didn't notice because I'm mostly self taught! :P

Thank you!
 

I am one of those silly students wondering why it wouldn't work on the Mac. Thank you for the update. I had already figured out a solution but thought maybe my version of Alice was broken.

There are a few other things that do not work correctly on my Mac. For instance, the wings on LichenZenspider do not have a transparent background. There are a few more items that this has happened with as well. Is that corrected with this update or is it something I have to tolerate while working on the Mac?

I doubt it is fixed.

You are correct. I downloaded the update and tried it for myself. Two images have big black boxes behind them in my simple little world.:(

They look great on the PC.:confused:

That's too bad...

Black boxes in graphics
 

We are stuck with the black boxes on the Mac for awhile, unfortunately. (I am not happy about it either as I am primarily a Mac user). It is related to the differences between DirectX which the Windows version uses for Alice graphics, and OpenGL, which the Mac and linux version uses (as they cannot use DirectX).

The two packages handle the alpha channel for graphics (related to transparency), and we have yet to figure out what we have to do on the Mac side to compensate.

This will not be an issue in Alice 3, as we are using OpenGL for both the Windows and Mac versions.

It's very simple, switch ALICE's scripting to a more versatile language.