DALEKTRON

Folks,

My eldest son, James, is now nine and I thought I try and teach him
some Smalltalk before the spectres of the curly braces get hold of him.
Since he is big in to computer games it seemed a good idea to try and
build some sort of game in order to, at least, start out with a fair
amount of interest. We decided to couple this with the "Doctor Who"
fever that has been sweeping the UK after the release of the new series
this year (those who don't know what I'm talking about may need to use
Google at this point).

The result of our efforts is a game called DalekTron. It's loosely
based on an arcade game called RoboTron that I used to play in the
1980's when these things were all the rage. I thought we could release
it to the beta group first to get you to try it out before letting it
loose on the outside world; after all it is written in D6. The link is:

http://www.object-arts.com/downloads/misc/dalektronsetup.exe

 From the educational point of view, this exercise has taught me quite a
bit about the complexity of Smalltalk with regard to children. James
has certainly picked up a lot of stuff about game building and some
stuff about programming but he is far from being able to "go it alone"
with any actual code creation. He does, however, seem to understand
quite a lot of what I'm doing as I make modifications to the gameplay
(this is, of course, done while he is in the midst of playing it).

 From the Smalltalk point of view, I'd like to use this as an example to
show that speedy, small and fun things can be done with the language,
especially if you couple the higher level language with some lower
level code like DirectX (which we use here). Although the download is
in the region of 20Mb, the actual application code is a Dolphin EXE of
only 700K; most of the download is media resources which is as it
should be for a game these days.

I'd like to solicit some response from you folks, if you can afford
some time to try this out. Don't expect anything too exciting but I'd
like to know about general issues before releasing it more widely (to
save likely embarrassment for James, myself and for Smalltalk). Things
like:

1) Does it run?
2) Does it run fast enough (does the frame rate drop much below 25fps
on your machine).
3) Does it run on Windows98 (I haven't got a setup here).
4) Can you (or your kids) beat James' current hi-score of 512,500!

The D6 code, BTW is included as packages in the install directory.
Don't expect anything too neat!

Best regards,

--
Andy Bower
Dolphin Support
www.object-arts.com

"Andy Bower" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:[hidden email]...
>
> My eldest son, James, is now nine and I thought I try and teach him
> some Smalltalk before the spectres of the curly braces get hold of him.
> Since he is big in to computer games it seemed a good idea to try and
> build some sort of game in order to, at least, start out with a fair
> amount of interest. We decided to couple this with the "Doctor Who"
> fever that has been sweeping the UK after the release of the new series
> this year (those who don't know what I'm talking about may need to use
> Google at this point).
...
> 1) Does it run?
Yes, it ran well on my two Windows XP SP2 machines.

> 2) Does it run fast enough (does the frame rate drop much below 25fps
> on your machine).
The frame rate looks pretty good to me.  On one machine there felt like
there was a slight bit of lag just before the music started playing, I did
not notice this on the other machine I tried it on.  It was very brief, not
something I would worry about.

> 3) Does it run on Windows98 (I haven't got a setup here).
Neither have I.

> 4) Can you (or your kids) beat James' current hi-score of 512,500!
I am lousy with video games so I am sure James has nothing to fear from my
high score. ;)

> The D6 code, BTW is included as packages in the install directory.
> Don't expect anything too neat!

It will be neat to see the direct draw code. I have not looked at the code
yet, but based on the resource files it looks like the program must be doing
a lot of image rendering.  I was very impressed by the performance given
what it must be doing.  I used the Dolphin DouleBufferView for my simple
game and I recall having performance trouble with much simpler graphics when
I had to do a lot of rendering.

One enhancement you may want to consider would be making it more obvious
that the player has been killed.  Perhaps a brief pause with some text
displayed might help.  The first few times I got killed and my character
reappeared I did not understand what happened.

Tell James that I liked his game.

Chris

"Andy Bower" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:[hidden email]...
> 1) Does it run?

yes, no problemos on XP

> 2) Does it run fast enough (does the frame rate drop much below 25fps
> on your machine).

it says 10 fps, but it does not look to jitterish, and at least lets me and
my old hands and reflexes survive a bit longer ;).

> 4) Can you (or your kids) beat James' current hi-score of 512,500!

well if I could somehow get it to 1 fps maybe I could stand a chance... ;)

Regarding teaching kids Smalltalk, I have tried with my sisters son to work
with your MS-Agents package. He was a bit older 13 I guess, and he could
write simple scripts in the workspace, that would run some sketch with a few
MS-Agents characters. But the whole environment (class browser, packages,
etc) was to overwhelming at the time. So my guess is that kids would catch
up with message sends, loops, ifs, even maybe with classes, but they would
need much simplified environment. From time to time I think of MS_Agents
development enviroment, which would basically run Smalltalk language, but
packed in size suitable to children, so that they could materialize their
ideas. Being able to produce interesting results quickly is also cruical.

rush
p.s. and as closing curiosity, DALEK in Croatian means Distant.
--
http://www.templatetamer.com/
http://www.folderscavenger.com/

Andy,

> From the educational point of view, this exercise has taught me quite a
> bit about the complexity of Smalltalk with regard to children. James
> has certainly picked up a lot of stuff about game building and some
> stuff about programming but he is far from being able to "go it alone"
> with any actual code creation. He does, however, seem to understand
> quite a lot of what I'm doing as I make modifications to the gameplay
> (this is, of course, done while he is in the midst of playing it).

Just out of curiosity, does the dense tree of Dalek sub-types make sense to
him ?  (Does it make sense that there are different /kinds/ of Daleks, even if
he doesn't connect much with the algorithmic/organised logic of actual method
bodies ?)


> 1) Does it run?

Yep.  Runs fine on my Win2K box (the same as has the beta installed).

> 2) Does it run fast enough (does the frame rate drop much below 25fps
> on your machine).

The machine's an old 650MHz laptop runing 1024x678 in 24-bit colour.  The game
claims to be running at around 15fps, which is plenty fast enough for a player
of my skill.  No obvious stuttering.

> 4) Can you (or your kids) beat James' current hi-score of 512,500!

Ha!  Not a chance...


> The D6 code, BTW is included as packages in the install directory.

It seems to be looking for a 'DirectShow' package which isn't supplied.
Generating a package from 'ActiveMovie control type library' fixed that.

BTW, I know we don't see eye-to-eye on the subject of comments, but if you are
planning to use the two View subclasses as examples of Dolphin, then I think
that they could do with quite a lot of explanatory text.  Views aren't
particularly well-understood by the Dolphin user community in the first place
(/I/ certainly don't claim to understand them well -- even though I've written
quite a number), and it's hard to see how the View logic and the DirectX logic
fit together.

    -- chris

> 1) Does it run?
No... I am getting this error (log attached).

It is a wxp sp1 box

regards,

Osvaldo


begin 666 DalekTron.ERRORS
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`
end

Osvaldo,

> > 1) Does it run?
> No... I am getting this error (log attached).
>
> It is a wxp sp1 box

Oh. That's some sort of error from DirectX. Do you have DX8 or above
installed on your box.

--
Andy Bower
Dolphin Support
www.object-arts.com

8.1 :(
any other thing i might take a look?

"Andy Bower" <[hidden email]> escribió en el mensaje
news:[hidden email]...

Andy Bower wrote:
<snip/>
>
> 1) Does it run?
Yes XP SP2
> 2) Does it run fast enough (does the frame rate drop much below 25fps
> on your machine).
25 fps
> 3) Does it run on Windows98 (I haven't got a setup here).
Pass
> 4) Can you (or your kids) beat James' current hi-score of 512,500!
>
I only got to ~32000 before pressing the "r" key that restarts.
This is very close to the "e" key for shooting North East.

> The D6 code, BTW is included as packages in the install directory.
> Don't expect anything too neat!
I look forward to having a browse at that.
>
> Best regards,
>

Chris,

> Just out of curiosity, does the dense tree of Dalek sub-types make
> sense to him ?  (Does it make sense that there are different kinds of
> Daleks, even if he doesn't connect much with the
> algorithmic/organised logic of actual method bodies ?)

Well, I quizzed him on this yesterday and he does seem to understand
the idea of classes and even inheritance (although I didn't call it
that).  So the fact that each Dalek has different behaviour and
appearance seems to have got through.

> > The D6 code, BTW is included as packages in the install directory.
>
> It seems to be looking for a 'DirectShow' package which isn't
> supplied.  Generating a package from 'ActiveMovie control type
> library' fixed that.

I've added that to the latest download, thanks. It's only used for
playing the MP3 theme tune file.

> BTW, I know we don't see eye-to-eye on the subject of comments, but
> if you are planning to use the two View subclasses as examples of
> Dolphin, then I think that they could do with quite a lot of
> explanatory text.  Views aren't particularly well-understood by the
> Dolphin user community in the first place (/I/ certainly don't claim
> to understand them well -- even though I've written quite a number),
> and it's hard to see how the View logic and the DirectX logic fit
> together.

Okay, I might accept that, given that I can hardly remember how those
classes work either. Anyway, in the latest release I have changed
significantly to support DirectX in fullscreen mode.

Best regards,

--
Andy Bower
Dolphin Support
www.object-arts.com

Osvaldo,

> any other thing i might take a look?

There is another version up there now which uses isDirectX in
fullscreen mode.  I'm not sure why that might solve the problem you
been having but you could try it anyway.

Best regards,

--
Andy Bower
Dolphin Support
www.object-arts.com

Oli,

> I only got to ~32000 before pressing the "r" key that restarts.
> This is very close to the "e" key for shooting North East.

Ah, good point.  I'll fix this in the next version.

--
Andy Bower
Dolphin Support
www.object-arts.com

Folks,

Thanks to everyone who left some feedback, either here or by e-mail. As
you will see from the normal Dolphin group and c.l.s, I've released the
game into the wider world.

Best regards,

--
Andy Bower
Dolphin Support
www.object-arts.com