*serious* memory leaks using software rendering

[meirs]

Mama is not the solution to everything, but it certainly is a solution when you suffer from memory leaks. There are number of reasons to memory leaks in Alice, the obvious one being it's infinite undo/redo stack. Since almost every command is recorded in the undo stack, the garbage collector cannot free much.

An alternative would be to restart Alice every 15-30 minutes (depends on the amount of typing you do), so the the undo stack is reset. That should handle about 80 percents of the memory leaks (far as I can tell, there are no memory leak bugs in the storage of the worlds, so having "big" worlds is normally not the reason to the lack of memory).

Regarding the slowness of Mama - the only place where you wait longer is on load & save of worlds, since these are now in unicode format, and XML parsing of unicode is inherently slower than non-unicode (the XML storage is one thing I didn't have the time to improve). Other than that, to my experience, Mama's response is normally equals to Alice's, and sometimes better.

[x2495iiii]

Originally Posted by zonedabone

meirs is a walking advertisement! These are the ALICE forums! Mama isn't the solution to everything. I used it, and it ran REALLY slow!

That's really not true. Consider a few things.

First, he worked very hard on mama, spending his time and effort making a software that would fix the problems students were having with Alice. Time is money, and the time he spent making this isn't something he was compensated in any way for (Alice may be free, but the Alice Team still gets paid and given college credit for working on Alice). Really, it's only fair for users who want to use Mama to pay for it.

Second, Mama may not be free, but he deliberately priced it so that the average student could easily afford it.

Third, I've used Mama for awhile now, and the only problems I've noticed are those which meirs has already acknowledged and has been working on diligently since Mama was first released. At the very least he's still working on and releasing bug-fixed versions regularly. The Alice Team, though working on a much grander scale, have given up entirely on Alice 2.2 and haven't released a stable version of Alice 3 to date (much less a bug-fix for any of the errors).

Finally, as for mentioning Mama on the forums, I personally don't see the problem in it. If there was a virus on your computer and you asked for a program to remove it, I'd tell you what the program was, regardless of whether it cost money or not. It's the same here: people are posting about their problems with Alice, and meirs is telling you that his program can help.

[zonedabone]

Sorry. Zonedabone was in a bad mood. I was mad at Alice, so I guess it isn't fair to judge mama. Again, sorry.

[meirs]

That's OK zonedabone, I share with you the solidarity with an open source such as Alice and it's great contribution to the studying of computer programming. After all Mama started at the point where Alice2.2 reached, so it's improvements stand on giants shoulders.

Just to add one point to x2495iiii's: Alice is not totally free, since you need a documentation to really know how to use it (especially if you're a teacher), and for that you need to pay something between 30$ to 60$, depending on the book you've chosen. Mama documentation is (and will be) free, so the difference is actually only a matter of a business model.

Regarding the slowness of Mama - the only place where you wait longer is on load & save of worlds, since these are now in unicode format, and XML parsing of unicode is inherently slower than non-unicode (the XML storage is one thing I didn't have the time to improve). Other than that, to my experience, Mama's response is normally equals to Alice's, and sometimes better.

And by now that's history - I've changed the storage from XML based into binary form (with backward compatibility) and now it runs terribly faster!
You'll have to download the new version - 1.5.2. - to try it yourself, enjoy

[x2495iiii]

I can confirm that. Just tried importing and executing RP 3.1 in mama and it's wonderful and CRAZY FAST! If RP4 turns out to be too big for Alice to handle, I'm importing it as a mama world and entering the exe file into the contest instead.

Go ahead and and try it for yourself. Unzip this file and try the Resident Penguin exe file. The 3d text is still messed up, but literally everything else is fixed and like I said before, the speed is amazing!

[jediaction]

Is this RP4?

My hero's game is like 48 MB. How do i make it a mama file

[x2495iiii]

No, it's RP 3.1.

Same way you would any other Alice world: Open mama, import the Alice world into it, then click the exe button in the upper right corner.

[meirs]

Originally Posted by x2495iiii

I can confirm that. Just tried importing and executing RP 3.1 in mama and it's wonderful and CRAZY FAST! If RP4 turns out to be too big for Alice to handle, I'm importing it as a mama world and entering the exe file into the contest instead.

Go ahead and and try it for yourself. Unzip this file and try the Resident Penguin exe file. The 3d text is still messed up, but literally everything else is fixed and like I said before, the speed is amazing!

Glad you liked it x2495iii - now the only left major issues are the audio synchronization and the support for Python scripting (as an alternative to Mama scripting). BTW, how did you manage to synchronize your contest-wining video on youtube?

[x2495iiii]

I did the voices while the soundless video was playing, slowed it down (to account for the speedup when exporting it), exported it, then imported the exported video into Movie Maker and synched the sound up there.

[jediaction]

Originally Posted by x2495iiii

No, it's RP 3.1.

Same way you would any other Alice world: Open mama, import the Alice world into it, then click the exe button in the upper right corner.

I cant! It does not see alice files only mama files