Squeak-dev October 2002

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183 participants
406 discussions

ElastoLab
by David Buck 01 Oct '02

01 Oct '02

> > >Alan Kay wrote: > >> It would be great for someone to do Elastolab in Squeak! >> >> Cheers, >> >> Alan > >True - but on the other hand I wish that David's work is an economic success, >too. Smalltalk needs to be a commercially viable platform, not just a great >toolbox and environment for thinkers and tinkerers. I and many others who >don't want to succumb to the dark side (I won't mention that dreaded J-word >here) depend on Smalltalk jobs which pay. And there are quite some who don't >have such jobs, sadly. That should not discourage anyone from trying to do >physics simulation stuff in Squeak to provide such a framework for free - >however just copying ElastoLab does not smell right to me. > In theory, the ElastoLab physics code should translate to Squeak with only the obvious syntactic changes. The UI code is well separated and would be fairly easy to port to Squeak. The custom controllers would have to be re-worked, but shouldn't be very hard. From a practical point of view, porting to Squeak is not a priority for me. I have a solution working in VisualWorks (with which I happen to be more familiar) and porting to Squeak offers me few advantages. I may at some point release the physics code as freeware and allow people to build their own UI's on top. If anyone would like technical details on implementing their own physics simulation code, I would be more than happy to offer advice and references and to chat about implementation approaches that work and ones that don't. You can contact me at david(a)simberon.com. >As far as Windows-only is concerned, VisualWorks comes from the same breed as >Squeak, and is binary portable to platforms such as Linux and Mac, too. I >don't know how deeply integrated with Windows ElastoLab actually is, but it >should be possible to make a Mac or Linux port with a reasonable amount of >effort. Doing Windows first is a reasonable economic decision (most kids with >computers will have Wintel stuff on their desks), but following up with Mac >and Linux would clearly demonstrate that Smalltalk is the "true" write once, >run everywhere language :-) > I would guess that 99% of ElastoLab is pure portable Smalltalk. There are only three things stopping me from getting a Mac or Linux port working: 1) The interface to play multiple sounds at once uses DirectX which is Windows-specific. I'd have to replace that with the Mac or Linux equivalent. 2) The interface to Windows HTML Help files is Windows-specific. 3) I use the Windows registry for the purposes of maintaining CD-ROM keys that enable ElastoLab to run in full non-demo mode. Other than that, I can see no obstacles to getting the port to work. I haven't done it because I don't have a Mac and I don't know the environment well enough to do the port. I also felt that if I couldn't get ElastoLab to be successful on Windows, adding Mac and Linux versions wouldn't make the difference. If ElastoLab is successful on the Windows platform, I could easily improve the success by adding Mac and Linux versions. The real risk is whether this kind of product will be accepted in the market place. So far, it's looking pretty dreary. I'm waiting for the release of the next version before I go all out in promotion, but initial sales are on the low side of dismal. I think I'm in for an uphill battle for a program that's not a game, not a simulation like SimCity, and not a physics tutorial. I have a hard time explaining to people what it is and what category it fits into. I think it's a lot of fun, but it's hard to convey that to people. (P.S. If anyone out there has Mac skills and would be interested in working on a port to the Mac, contact me and we can make arrangements to get it done.) David Buck Simberon Inc. www.simberon.com

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[BUG] PasteUpMorph becomes a Sketch (Etoy)
by Bert Freudenberg 01 Oct '02

01 Oct '02

When a Playfield is told to "look like" another morph it becomes a SketchMorph. I'd expect it to just change its appeareance. That is, it should change its sticky background morph to look like that other Morph. This would be consistent with the fact that I can just paint on it via the halo, which actually paints onto the background morph. I'm not quite sure where to hook into, so no fix yet. -- Bert

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[Enh]Auto Scroll
by Torge Husfeldt 01 Oct '02

01 Oct '02

subtitle: "[Q]how many wheels am i reinventing right now." Hi List, I am planning to program a proof of principle for a 2D Point&click advinter a la "Baphomets Fluch"/"Monkey Island"/"Indiana Jones 3/4". As a first step i wrote a sibling to TwoWayScrollPane called PanningView that has no scrollbars but scrolls automatically when the mouse comes near the edges. I made this behavior also accesable to all ScrollPanes by means of the CustomMenu. Please see the attached changset and comment on one or more of the following points: -do i reinvent wheels -does this seem remotely useful -does this file in correctly -does this work in your image -does my solution appeal in any way (i.e. what would you have done better) Thankful for any feedback. Torge

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About TableLayout
by Stephane Ducasse 01 Oct '02

01 Oct '02

Hi The tableLayout seems really good. Good job. I just have a small problem When I do the following the rectangleMorph doesn't wrap the buttons it contains. Any idea why? | row | row _ RectangleMorph new. row layoutPolicy: TableLayout new. row layoutInset: 1@1. row borderWidth: 0. row listDirection: #leftToRight. row hResizing: #spaceFill; vResizing: #shrinkWrap. row addMorph: (SimpleButtonMorph new target: self; label: 'Quit'; actionSelector: #delete; borderColor: #raised; borderWidth: 2; color: color). row addMorph: (SimpleButtonMorph new target: field; label: 'New game'; actionSelector: #newGame; borderColor: #raised; borderWidth: 2; color: color). row addMorph: (SimpleButtonMorph new target: field; label: 'New game'; actionSelector: #newGame; borderColor: #raised; borderWidth: 2; color: color). row openInWorld Dr. Stéphane DUCASSE (ducasse(a)iam.unibe.ch) http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/ "if you knew today was your last day on earth, what would you do different? ... especially if, by doing something different, today might not be your last day on earth" Calvin&Hobbes

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#next, #next:
by Bill Schwab 01 Oct '02

01 Oct '02

Hello all, comp.lang.smalltalk.dolphin brought the following to my attention: 'a' readStream next; next answers nil vs. throwing an exception, and extrapolating, I tried 'abc' next:5 and got 'abc' vs. an exception. Does Flow (so far, I can't load it in my 3.2 image and haven't had time to try it in a clean image) or some other project address this issue? Bill Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D. bills(a)anest4.anest.ufl.edu (352) 846-1285

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Update on MIDI lockup
by Bill Schwab 01 Oct '02

01 Oct '02

Andreas, I've all but proven that my "MIDI" lockup is in fact independent of the MIDI primitives. At least on a particular machine, I can reliably lock it up using only a simulated source of data. Once the system locks up, the 3.2.2 (5-26-02) VM's Dump call stack command always seems to show a particular background process in various stages of activity, but never waiting on a semaphore. My interpretation (contradictory opinions will be cheerfully considered) is that the morphic main loop is being deadlocked by another of my threads, or (much less likely I think) is somehow failing to wake up from a wait for some other reason. I couldn't find the call stack code in the VM source that I had on hand; in looking for an update, I saw the new VM, and found the call stack code in its source. More, I found printAllStacks(), which sounds like the output that I want to see. Is it exposed somewhere in the menus? If not, would it be as simple as exchanging printAllStacks for printCallStack near the bottom of sqWin32Prefs.c and recompiling? Thanks for adding this stuff! Bill Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D. bills(a)anest4.anest.ufl.edu (352) 846-1285

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