Hi ST,

Should I rewrite my sticky at the advanced topics? There's plenty of new stuff that has happened, and it really needs the update.

Hardmath123
Hi ST,

Should I rewrite my sticky at the advanced topics? There's plenty of new stuff that has happened, and it really needs the update.

Yeah! Great idea.

Basically, it doesn't make sense to bring over stuff from the old site that's not updated - so if you want to update and repost, that's a great plan!

AT won't be available publicly till the release, but you can do it here, and once you're are done, just report and we'll move it there so it'll show up once we do release.

Great! Just finish my homework, study for the test, play piano, some math…



…can I get back to you tomorrow?

Can you read over my draft? I haven't included any links yet, because they will change after the migration (new threads will come up).

Welcome to the Advanced Topics!
A tour of the ATs

Hi, and welcome the the Advanced Topics! This forum is completely unique from the rest of the forums you see around here, because it's where one of the most diverse yet smartest group of people gets together and makes all kinds of awesome stuff. In this post, I'll give a short history of the ATs (which you can safely skip, though I recommend reading it because it's really interesting). I'll try to summarize a lot of what is currently going on on this forum. I'll give a few tips on etiquette we follow, and lastly have a small reference of useful tips.

History of the ATs
I've been on the Scratch website since about February 2010. Back in the era of Scratch 1.4, Scratch was written in Squeak and had to be downloaded. Some Scratchers found out, by looking at the Squeak source code, that you can get into the Scratch source code with a little hack (shift-clicking the “R” of the logo). This got us all pretty excited, because we could do whatever we wanted! We ended up with a beautiful array of custom-made blocks (which was not possible in Scratch 1.4) which could do anything: read and write files, read webpages, connect to the internet, multiplayer blocks, blocks to run scripts very fast; pretty much anything you can imagine. In fact, the user sparks actually made a library which quickly grew to include over a hundred blocks and had 5 librarians. Even better, though, we could distribute modified Scratch programs into what were called Scratch Mod(ification)s. There were well over 20 of these, some specially oriented (e.g. Enchanting to control Lego Mindstorms), but two really stood out. BYOB, now called Snap!, was oriented towards teaching more advanced computer science including scary-but-awesome word like Lambda and Lexical Scope. Panther gave advanced functionality like file input-output and internet connectivity. Between these two mods, Scratch was pretty much taken to the limit.

Current Events: What's going on?

Since Scratch 2.0 has been released, we have been hacking the new file format. You can inspect it by downloading the project (File >> Export to local disk…) and renaming it to *.zip. Scratchers have already made hacked blocks with drop-down inputs by editing the files, and have written entire JavaScript-based players (sb2.js by RHY).

Right now, there are a bunch of cool little projects going on. Here are a few notable ones:

Snap! (the exclamation point is compulsory), the future incarnation of BYOB, is being rewritten in JavaScript. This allows for much better functionality, including support on iPads! You can visit the Snap!pers' haunt ***here***. Don't think we just discuss Snap! here, though. The Snap! team, Berkeley professor Brian Harvey (bharvey) and Jens Mönig (Jens) are constantly on there, and discussions range from advanced college-level computer science to riddles about centipedes.

The old 1.4 file format, a very complex structure, has been completely hacked out by blob8108. He wrote a simple-to-use Python library called Kurt which can be used to modify Scratch files (for example, he used it to add a few hundred images to a project in a few seconds via local file editing).

Who knows what we will discover on the ATs now that we have a whole new Scratch to play with?

Some Etiquette

There are some really simple things you can do to help keep the ATs a friendly place.

• Try not to make discussions too unrelated to Scratch. It's ok to ask a question like “How do I make an inherited class in Python?” once in a while, but too many of those gets annoying, especially since at the end of the day, this is a Scratch forum. You can use StackOverflow for questions like these. Remember, the forums are more for discussion than for simple question-and-answer.
  
• Help people out! If you have the answer to a question, or any suggestion or input, feel free to post it! As long as your tone is respectful and considerate, people love to get any kind of feedback, and whatever help you give will be good for them.
  
• If you have a question, first Google it! If your question is easy to answer with a simple search on Google, please don't post it here. Scratchers sincerely try to help out, and typing out a solution to a problem does take effort.
  

Thank you!

Useful Tips
Using the code tags
You can use BBcode to make your posts nicer and easier to read. A nice reference courtesy nXIII can be found ***here***. For ATers, the most important tag is [code]:
Makes:
You can use lots of languages; a complete list can be found ***here***. You can also type [code] to get a plain monospaced font without highlighting.

Sharing code
To share large codebases, you can use Github, or you can upload ZIP archives to Google Docs. Both are accepted here. Remember to give access privileges to the public—you're technically not allowed to share email addresses.

Hardmath123
riddles about centipedes

It's an erg!

technoboy10 wrote:

Hardmath123 wrote:

riddles about centipedes

It's an erg!

So you read it!

(I put that in as a joke, don't worry ST!)

Bump. Lightnin?

Wow, you did a really good job at writing it! It looks good to me.

I asked Hardmath this, but I'm just that impatient.

What sort of inputs can I add, and how?