The Animal Race

So today I went to the computer and opened ALICE and continued to work on my skateboard project. Now the plan was simply to have a skater move up and down a ramp in a way directed by me. The problem was that creating those movements and making them look natural on this program is tedious and difficult. So that idea was scrapped. But I turned to a new idea. I started putting trees into the world and then I just start putting animals into it as I browsed through the objects. Then I noticed that there was an object that was a turtle but he had a sweat band on and sneakers (which I thought was hilarious.) So I thought maybe the animals can have a race. Then the user can use their mouse to guide themselves through the course. And instead of having them just run through trees or something, I decided to make many different environments that are all connected. And there was this monkey on there that I thought was so cute. So he had to be the host. He already came with methods that lets him screech and jump and things like that. Some objects have methods created by other users that you can use in your world.

Monday May 21st- 2nd entry

Today when I went to log in and finish designing my Revenge of the Nerds program, the methods I created last time were gone! I looked for them everywhere but I could not find them. The wierd thing was that the methods could not have been deleted anything because the program still ran. I think th methods were just hidden and I couldn't figure out how to unhide them. I was so frustrated because I couldn't change or add to the methods the way that I wanted to. I decided to scrap that idea and I started another world for like the third time. For my next world I wanted to make a haunted house that user can travel through using the mouse. That was no good because I couldn't stop the mouse from traveling through walls. Plus the corridors took way too long to set up because when I put the objects in the world I had to do them one at a time. Next world. I wanted to create a haunted amusement park that the user can navigate through and maybe play different games when an object was clicked on. That didn't turn out so well. It was impossible for me to have the user navigate through the world without going through the objects. By this time I was ready to quit. But playing with the software is so fun because you always learn something new that the software can do. Its real simple software and has limited thngs that it can do. The challenge is using the software for what it can do and making a program that is good.

The First Day

For my senior project I chose to design a program for the freshman to use using the Alice software. Alice is software that creates simulations of user designed scenarios with animations. I'm in there from second period to fifth period. I went in having little experience with the program but I had watched some of the tutorials so I knew some of the basics. This day just consisted on getting to know the program better. I thought it was interesting playing with the software because it did a lot of different things. I got kind of frustrated because when I was designed a world and putting objects in the worlds the computer would freeze or slow down because it uses so much virtual memory. The time seemed to go by pretty quickly so I didn't feel that it dragged on too much. I went through a couple of worlds before creating one. Its about nerdy students who are picked on by the jocks called Revenge of the Nerds. The students will be able to hit the teachers and other students with food in the cafeteria.