Discuss Scratch

iamunknown2
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Operation Mendeleev: Revival of Elemental (which was a revival of Web Blox) :P

What is Elemental?

See here.

Why does it need yet another reboot?

Note: Admittedly, I am also to blame, as I was part of the Elemental Dev Team which slacked off in the middle :P

Unfortunately, although ElementalCode started pretty well, the commits in the official repository came to a halt around July 2016.

Instead of starting over from scratch (badum tss), we can continue from the Elemental repository over on GitHub.

Why is it called Mendeleev?

it's named after Mendeleev, the person who invented/discovered the table of elements.

If anyone wants to (re)-join, please reply to this post!

Edit: Also, please sign up for a GitHub account if you haven't got one!

Last edited by iamunknown2 (April 1, 2017 23:39:07)

docaiden
Scratcher
100+ posts

Operation Mendeleev: Revival of Elemental (which was a revival of Web Blox) :P

Ok i would like to join the project.

Last edited by docaiden (April 1, 2017 15:00:54)

jokebookservice1
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Operation Mendeleev: Revival of Elemental (which was a revival of Web Blox) :P

Okay, I'll join if you accept me.
-stache-
Scratcher
500+ posts

Operation Mendeleev: Revival of Elemental (which was a revival of Web Blox) :P

I can probably contribute now and then…
infinitytec
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Operation Mendeleev: Revival of Elemental (which was a revival of Web Blox) :P

I'll join, but I probably can't do much until summer.
I can do front-end HTML and CSS as well as testing.
Firedrake969
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Operation Mendeleev: Revival of Elemental (which was a revival of Web Blox) :P

If this wasn't an April Fool's joke, feel free to ask me stuff about the editor since I wrote a lot of it (along with NickyNouse)

Last edited by Firedrake969 (April 3, 2017 16:46:01)

herohamp
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Operation Mendeleev: Revival of Elemental (which was a revival of Web Blox) :P

Is this April fools joke? Cus I was getting happy as Elemental was cool.
__init__
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Operation Mendeleev: Revival of Elemental (which was a revival of Web Blox) :P

When I saw the title I was excited because Mendeleev looked like an anagram of Elemental at first.

You disappointed me

elemen-dev? almost
PullJosh
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Operation Mendeleev: Revival of Elemental (which was a revival of Web Blox) :P

Any particular reason why you're changing the name? I was quite fond of “Elemental”, myself.
NickyNouse
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Operation Mendeleev: Revival of Elemental (which was a revival of Web Blox) :P

iamunknown2 wrote:

Instead of starting over from scratch (badum tss), we can continue from the Elemental repository over on GitHub.
So there's no new repo, we're just renaming it? I don't understand

Oh “operation mendeleev” is the name of an effort to revive Elemental. Ok I think I gotcha

Firedrake969 wrote:

If this wasn't an April Fool's joke, feel free to ask me stuff about the editor since I wrote a lot of it (along with NickyNouse)
^

Something I never loved about how Elemental was structured was that the code that makes blocks is kinda flimsy (no offense FD), like a block is just some HTML elements with some event listeners on them. Compare it to Blockly, which has gorgeous constructors and blocks are actual objects. I'd love to overhaul the blocks if we're picking this back up

Last edited by NickyNouse (April 5, 2017 04:11:27)

Firedrake969
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Operation Mendeleev: Revival of Elemental (which was a revival of Web Blox) :P

NickyNouse wrote:

iamunknown2 wrote:

Instead of starting over from scratch (badum tss), we can continue from the Elemental repository over on GitHub.
So there's no new repo, we're just renaming it? I don't understand

Oh “operation mendeleev” is the name of an effort to revive Elemental. Ok I think I gotcha

Firedrake969 wrote:

If this wasn't an April Fool's joke, feel free to ask me stuff about the editor since I wrote a lot of it (along with NickyNouse)
^

Something I never loved about how Elemental was structured was that the code that makes blocks is kinda flimsy (no offense FD), like a block is just some HTML elements with some event listeners on them. Compare it to Blockly, which has gorgeous constructors and blocks are actual objects. I'd love to overhaul the blocks if we're picking this back up
Yeah, one issue that immediately comes to mind was that we didn't really have a way to save an individual block stack outside of the actual page (analogous to a block in Scratch saved, but not attached to a “when green flag clicked” hat)

The issue was probably that the dragging was developed first and I made the dragging too tightly coupled to the actual parsing logic… I might be interested in refactoring it actually

stream of consciousness stuff

have some data structure to keep track of blocks maybe a dict/hash map with md5 hashes correponding to block ids and then ondragcomplete on the block update the position and (if applicable) where it is in a given block stack, relative to a specific preceding id that way the dragging would just be a way to modify the internal structure instead of having the external structure be the defining data
somehow store block stacks in possibly another dict/hash map with keys of the id of the top block so that way we can combine stacks and stuff

if this doesn't make sense I'll try to clarify it later

Last edited by Firedrake969 (April 5, 2017 20:22:06)

NickyNouse
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Operation Mendeleev: Revival of Elemental (which was a revival of Web Blox) :P

Firedrake969 wrote:

NickyNouse wrote:

iamunknown2 wrote:

Instead of starting over from scratch (badum tss), we can continue from the Elemental repository over on GitHub.
So there's no new repo, we're just renaming it? I don't understand

Oh “operation mendeleev” is the name of an effort to revive Elemental. Ok I think I gotcha

Firedrake969 wrote:

If this wasn't an April Fool's joke, feel free to ask me stuff about the editor since I wrote a lot of it (along with NickyNouse)
^

Something I never loved about how Elemental was structured was that the code that makes blocks is kinda flimsy (no offense FD), like a block is just some HTML elements with some event listeners on them. Compare it to Blockly, which has gorgeous constructors and blocks are actual objects. I'd love to overhaul the blocks if we're picking this back up
Yeah, one issue that immediately comes to mind was that we didn't really have a way to save an individual block stack outside of the actual page (analogous to a block in Scratch saved, but not attached to a “when green flag clicked” hat)

The issue was probably that the dragging was developed first and I made the dragging too tightly coupled to the actual parsing logic… I might be interested in refactoring it actually

stream of consciousness stuff

have some data structure to keep track of blocks maybe a dict/hash map with md5 hashes correponding to block ids and then ondragcomplete on the block update the position and (if applicable) where it is in a given block stack, relative to a specific preceding id that way the dragging would just be a way to modify the internal structure instead of having the external structure be the defining data
somehow store block stacks in possibly another dict/hash map with keys of the id of the top block so that way we can combine stacks and stuff

if this doesn't make sense I'll try to clarify it later
I think Blockly does something along those lines

or we could use something lazy like https://github.com/yahoo/serialize-javascript to serialize the whole workspace
NickyNouse
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Operation Mendeleev: Revival of Elemental (which was a revival of Web Blox) :P

Also we should make a bigger effort to keep heroku up to date with gh-paes
Firedrake969
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Operation Mendeleev: Revival of Elemental (which was a revival of Web Blox) :P

NickyNouse wrote:

Also we should make a bigger effort to keep heroku up to date with gh-paes
https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Submodules

maybe
NickyNouse
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Operation Mendeleev: Revival of Elemental (which was a revival of Web Blox) :P

Firedrake969 wrote:

NickyNouse wrote:

Also we should make a bigger effort to keep heroku up to date with gh-paes
https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Submodules

maybe
Maybe… you still have to go and fetch/pull the latest version of submodules, and git might complain if the submodule is another branch of the same project (I betcha it would just work tho, git is great like that)

is heroku already set up with GH integration to stay up to date with the master branch?
Firedrake969
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Operation Mendeleev: Revival of Elemental (which was a revival of Web Blox) :P

NickyNouse wrote:

Firedrake969 wrote:

NickyNouse wrote:

Also we should make a bigger effort to keep heroku up to date with gh-paes
https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Submodules

maybe
Maybe… you still have to go and fetch/pull the latest version of submodules, and git might complain if the submodule is another branch of the same project (I betcha it would just work tho, git is great like that)

is heroku already set up with GH integration to stay up to date with the master branch?
Yeah

although I took down the site since we stopped working on it

Last edited by Firedrake969 (April 8, 2017 04:29:34)

NickyNouse
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Operation Mendeleev: Revival of Elemental (which was a revival of Web Blox) :P

Firedrake969 wrote:

NickyNouse wrote:

Firedrake969 wrote:

NickyNouse wrote:

Also we should make a bigger effort to keep heroku up to date with gh-paes
https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Submodules

maybe
Maybe… you still have to go and fetch/pull the latest version of submodules, and git might complain if the submodule is another branch of the same project (I betcha it would just work tho, git is great like that)

is heroku already set up with GH integration to stay up to date with the master branch?
Yeah

although I took down the site since we stopped working on it
welp

It looks like heroku automatically re-fetches submodules every time you push to it: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/git-submodules but I don't see a way to make that happen more often/automatically

we could prolly have git fetch the latest version of the submodule when the dyno starts up?
iamunknown2
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Operation Mendeleev: Revival of Elemental (which was a revival of Web Blox) :P

NickyNouse wrote:

Also we should make a bigger effort to keep heroku up to date with gh-paes
I have a friend who has some Google Cloud Server space for his Minecraft servers (although he says he has abandoned the server and switched to helping out on another server). Maybe I can ask him for cloud server space (if that's allowed ).

I also have a cheap domain (thanks mom!) called iamunknowntwo.com (not sure if that's the actual domain, don't go there). Maybe I can use that.

Heroku might not be that good, since our timezones are nearly complementary (i.e there is very little overlap between the times where we are awake ).

For hosting, we could use something like nearlyfreespech.net if we actually want to get the site up and running.

Last edited by iamunknown2 (April 9, 2017 07:10:40)

iamunknown2
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Operation Mendeleev: Revival of Elemental (which was a revival of Web Blox) :P

Also, what is this!? It's pretty weird, since…

  1. The logo is totally different from what we have now
  2. There is nothing else on the site other than the image.

I've also tried looking up the image, but this site is the only site with that image on it.
Jonathan50
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Operation Mendeleev: Revival of Elemental (which was a revival of Web Blox) :P

iamunknown2 wrote:

Also, what is this!? It's pretty weird, since…

  1. The logo is totally different from what we have now
  2. There is nothing else on the site other than the image.

I've also tried looking up the image, but this site is the only site with that image on it.
I think there is a 99% chance it's just the personal website of someone who has never heard of this kind of Elemental before.

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