Alice in a Squeak Wonderland
Alice in a Squeak Wonderland by Jeff Pierce.
Current Draft: pierce.pdf
Promised Reviewers:
Doug Way
Joshua Gargus
Comments:
The address ftp://cs.uiuc.edu/Squeak/Alice/Objects.zip mentioned in the text is not valid. Is it planned to put stuff there? If yes, you might want to use the version at http://balloon.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/squeak/Objects.zip because the original had problems with uppercase filenames so it would not work on Unix. –bf
Jeff,
I found your chapter very interesting and helpful. Here are a couple of minor comments.
In the sections "Working with the mouse" and "Camera controls", I did not see information describing how to do this on a Mac system.
In the section "Styles of animation", the first sentence "By default Squeak Alice animations commands using an ease-in / ease-out (also known as slow in / slow out ) animation style" does not parse well.
Jerome E. Garcia
Mark's Review of "Alice in a Squeak Wonderland"
Jeff, this is such a nicely written chapter! It really read well, and I enjoyed your motivation for the chapter in terms of storytelling.
I only have a couple of overall issues, and then a set of detail things:
- Do you want to talk about any of the enhancements to Wonderland since the original work? In particular, I was thinking about ActiveTextures and Pooh. The latter may be too new, but the former is particularly relevant, I think.
- What do you think about returning to the storytelling theme at the end by comparing/contrasting Wonderland and Alice and mentioning the kinds of applications where Alice has been used at CMU? Randy tells his great stories (and example movies) about Alice. Perhaps a mention of that at the end, saying that Alice has been used for this storytelling-by-non-programmers and suggesting that maybe Alice could, too?
- Obviously, use of the Workspace style to highlight the code and some illustrations will help.
Issues
- p. 1: There are lots of Alice papers at this point, besides the (very nice!) new CHI paper. Perhaps a couple more refs, to point to other potential sources of further information?
- p. 3: You could talk about Alt-D and Alt-P as DoIt and PrintIt, so that it's clear that it's the same operation that we Mac users do as Cmd-D and Cmd-P.
- p. 2 and p.4: Italicize the URLs? Or underline them?
- p. 4: So I've been making some models in 3DS format, and have been loading in pre-made models in VRML. What's confused me the most as been the "size" of Wonderland and my models. When I load in a VRML, I almost always find my Camera embedded in the middle of a HUGE object. How does this work? How "big" (in whatever scale is appropriate) is Wonderland? How do VRML/3DS scales get mapped into Wonderland?
- p. 5: I've never seen the "tumble the actor arbitrarily" referenced before. It's cool to say, but could you give a screenshot to explain? Without a screenshot, perhaps drop because you probably won't do it often?
- p. 6: "people take a second or two..." This is a nice principle – is there a ref?
- p. 8-9: In "Parent-Child Relationships," would it be worthwhile mentioning that one can make planes and similar objects in order to build things from scratch (not that people will do it often)?
- p. 10: Okay, I've got to admit that {0. 2. 0} as {Left. Up. Forward} didn't work for me here, nor in the CHI paper. I bought the example in the CHI paper that people think in terms of moving forward and then translate to XYZ, so providing motion in terms of Left/Up/Forward instead of XYZ makes total sense. Where it breaks down for me is as an ABSOLUTE coordinate. "bunny moveTo: {0. 2. 0}" reads to me as "move Bunny 2 steps up" – a relative motion, not an absolute. What does it mean as an absolute coordinate?
- p. 12: "velocity in meters per second" is a lovely statement – it makes Wonderland very concrete. But it returns me to my earlier question: Just how big is Wonderland? How many meters is it?
- p. 12 "eachFrameUntil:" should be Symbol style
- p. 12 "bunny moveTo: {asIs. 0. asIs} eachFrame: 10" as "move along the ground for the next 10 seconds" completely confuses me. "asIs" sounds like "leave it asIs" and 0 sounds like "no change in Up," so it sounds like there should be no motion at all.
- p. 12: asSeenBy and moveTo: actually DOES make sense to me. {0. 0. 1} asSeenBy: camera works – it says "Be 1 step/meter/whatever Forward from Camera". But again, it feels like RELATIVE to me (camera) not an absolute. Maybe I just need to play in Wonderland more...:-)
- p. 14: "Composing Animations" I've been wondering all along why doTogether: and doInOrder: takes {}. Perhaps a footnote for those of us who know some Squeak and expect square brackets there for a Block?
- p. 15: When you add ten to "Schedule getTime," what are the units? Is it seconds or frames?
- p. 17: "Blending 2D and 3D" sounds like a good point to introduce active textures.
- p. 18: I really liked the "Squeak Alice Implementation" section! But I didn't quite grok "immediate mode" – does it meant that Balloon3D just blasts stuff up, and doesn't know what it's drawing? While "retained mode" actually maintains a model of what it's being drawn?
- p. 19: rightNow at bottom should probably be in Symbol style?
- p. 20: What is the processing cost of adding additional WonderlandCamera's? Is it a linear cost or exponential? Does each WonderlandCamera drop the framerate by a small amount, or does the second WonderlandCamera half the rate?
Joshua Gargus' review: wonderland-review.morph.gz
alice can i talk to you soon
i think you are so cool making fake hair
i love your hair styels
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