Try/test Score please.

It's not done (not even sure if it will ever be “done”). I'm putting it up for your feedback. So please, try it out and comment here if you find problems or to critique how it works.

I like the design philosophy of Scratch and want to stay close to that but have a slightly more advanced audience in mind for this tool. I intend Score to be for users who are already knowledgeable with Scratch and who mostly work on making games. I mean for it to help make better games (2D games still). Most of the changes from Scratch will not be general “improvements” but will add capabilities to this end. I think some things are working but I haven't made projects with it yet, I just got to a somewhat stable set of blocks I think… if they're working.

Right now I'm trying to make it handle sprites and clones more like object “classes” and “instances”. Right now, Score should allow you to access the names of your sprites and to create clones with new names. You can grab individual clones and handle all of their properties from the scripts of other sprites. Each clone has an ID which says how many sprites/clones before it had that name. So the first sprite or clone with a new name has ID 0. Deleting clones does not change the IDs (clone a sprite and it will have ID 1. delete that clone then make another, it will have ID 2). There is also the ability to “tag” sprites and clones and grab them by their tags.

There are a couple of demo projects at the bottom of the page. One is a very simple demo of some of the blocks. The other is an RTS i will continue to update as I work on it. Making it is helping me come up with ideas for Score. If you want to make something that works and shows off the clone handling of Score, mark it up with easy-to-follow comments and I would be honored to put yours up too if you'd allow me. But primarily I want your feedback.

Here's the majority of new blocks so far (there are a few more variants of these):


*note: this is a work in progress. These blocks could change or move to different drawers. They may be buggy. Please try Score and suggests things if you'd like, but please don't plan to rely on Score for any project you care about anytime soon. Also be aware, this is a bit of a hobby project of mine. I will probably work on this off and on for a while but may eventually just abandon the project.

I started working on this on the 15th and didn't know anything about Scratch source code before that. I owe getting into this as quickly as I did to the sticky at the top of this forum and all the discussion there and elsewhere in the AT forum. I've also received help from djdolphin on the forums (ty). Without this help I wouldn't have been able to even get started. But I'm not terribly knowledgeable yet so I'm stuck making blocks. I want to add some better graphics making tools when I learn how. I probably won't work on this much this week but next on the agenda would be to add some stuff like file IO (like to a website), multiplayer and better graphics tools. I have no real idea how to do these things so also if you have suggestions about those, I'm all ears!

Thank you in advance for checking this out
Sorry in advance for the bugs

I forgot these… probably the best ones

Cool! Keep working on it!!! I would change the colors, though. How did you manage to change them?

Where is pen up and down? Did the ST remove them or?

ChocolatePi wrote:

Cool! Keep working on it!!! I would change the colors, though. How did you manage to change them?

Thank you. I like the colors, but I'll see what other say
The colors are mostly in the CSS.as file but others can be found by searching through the source code files for hex color codes. Just change them to see what they do.

QuillzToxic wrote:

Where is pen up and down? Did the ST remove them or?

Was a sprite selected?

Black background? COOL!

Love the new skin and all the new blocks! (also darnit! I was working on my own mod called score, ah well)

Awesome mod!

That skin looks awesome! For some reason I can not type in any text input though. You might want to fix that.

Thanks guys.

And sorry TPG, I know how that feels. Actually, I was going to wait before showing people this but I though ‘score’ made a perfect name for a scratch mod for games and I was worried someone would claim the name before I got around to it, so yesterday after thinking about it I decided I should posted it immediately.
Sorry though.

nathanprocks wrote:

That skin looks awesome! For some reason I can not type in any text input though. You might want to fix that.

Sorry nathan, I have no idea why that would be. I'll try the site on other computers today and see if they have that problem too. Mine doesn't. Was it just the new blocks or old ones too? Edit: Didn't notice the problem, I think it's on your end though that is strange if you run Scratch fine but not Score…

Cool, and awesome skin changes! I'd only recommend making the category names more visible (white text, maybe?).

Another idea: Maybe you could have a new kind of object for lists. Example: Instead of having:

(tag #(1)::sensing)
(count tags::sensing)

you could have

(tags::sensing) // returns a Scratch list with the tags

cauzality wrote:

And sorry TPG, I know how that feels. Actually, I was going to wait before showing people this but I though ‘score’ made a perfect name for a scratch mod for games and I was worried someone would claim the name before I got around to it, so yesterday after thinking about it I decided I should posted it immediately.
Sorry though.

It's fine your mod was a lot more fleshed out anyway.

powerpoint56 wrote:

Cool, and awesome skin changes! I'd only recommend making the category names more visible (white text, maybe?).

Another idea: Maybe you could have a new kind of object for lists. Example: Instead of having:

(tag #(1)::sensing)
(count tags::sensing)

you could have

(tags::sensing) // returns a Scratch list with the tags

Thanks. That's a great idea. Actually, that was the original plan but I'm a little confused about everything involved with the lists in Scratch. I don't believe they are actionscript primitives/datatypes. Didn't have a lot of time so I got them working an easier way as actionscript arrays (just strings in brackets… no gui stuff). I will get around to making it work like the other lists in Scratch eventually.

On the colors… I will collect comments for a time and base any changes on the aggregate of the results so to speak. So that probably isn't going to change right away, but I do appreciate your time and consideration here. Thank you.

cauzality wrote:

Thanks. That's a great idea. Actually, that was the original plan but I'm a little confused about everything involved with the lists in Scratch. I don't believe they are actionscript primitives/datatypes. Didn't have a lot of time so I got them working an easier way as actionscript arrays (just strings in brackets… no gui stuff). I will get around to making it work like the other lists in Scratch eventually..

Cool! I'm excited to see if Actionscript arrays (or some new variation) are more efficient!

UPDATE
you can now print variables onto the stage as normal text


There are also blocks for changing the field's dimensions, and controlling background and border options*. If you try these out, let me know how user-friendly/intuitive (or how not so) you think these blocks are compared to other things in scratch. Can't really work on this for the rest of the weekend but will try using this in the RTS I'm working on concurrently (link at bottom of score page) next week. Next up will probably be more string manipulation blocks and read/write file capabilities.

Side note: anyone know anything about trying to add multiplayer (online) capabilities to a scratch mod and would be willing to advise me?



*Also note, when you select a color for the border or background, your must set them to show before printing will update this. They each have a color and a boolean. Setting the color will not set the bool true.

cazuality wrote:

Side note: anyone know anything about trying to add multiplayer (online) capabilities to a scratch mod and would be willing to advise me?

You could try something like firebase. It works a lot like cloud data except it's faster and can store entire json trees. (I thinking of making an extension for it…)

MegaApuTurkUltra wrote:

You could try something like firebase. It works a lot like cloud data except it's faster and can store entire json trees. (I thinking of making an extension for it…)

Thank you! I will look into that as soon as I have time.

nice black background and cool new blocks!

<shown?>::looks

Penguin9090_new wrote:

nice black background and cool new blocks!

<shown?>::looks

Thanks.

Also… Another, sadder update:

The print blocks I just added required changes in some object classes. It appears my demo projects, built before this change, are no longer working. Not sure I will be able to fix this and won't be able to look at this for a couple of days. I'll post again then.

You may be able to fix if you delete all the variable and replace with new ones you make. Not sure…