There's a moth in my machine!

Ahhh - the last 3D SEP class today makes me alternately proud and sad, never enough time to get to everything/everyone, and yet, so inspired by youthful beginner minds! I have to honestly say that teaching K-5 always re-sets my professional computer programming mindset, reminding me to embrace the unexpected and find the fun in solving puzzles ;) One new puzzle that came up, was, how to add buttons to your game interface, which when you click, act as event handlers to trigger something to happen, like shoot blip? Researching the Kodu user forum, I found the answer; check it out! Tip: the button does not display in "edit" mode, but will show when you "play" your project. I've added a new "button" project template to the wiki named "Button test".

At our last class, we devoted a good amount of time debugging projects, and the good thing with beta platforms like Kodu and Sculptris is that they give you lots of practice encountering glitches and coming up with workaround solutions. By the way, did you know the origin of why we call problem solving debugging? Check out the history here. "...little faults and difficulties ... show themselves and months of intense watching, study, and labor are requisite before ... success or failure are achieved". And, so we watched, studied and labored to figure out solutions to these project mysteries:

Paging through a Kodu project in world settings, I found that when you attach a file to create a new level in your game, Kodu represents the attached level about half way through setting options, just under "music volume". We ran into a project with several attached levels that at one point, combined 2 attached projects into one instead of keeping the 2 files separate in a progressive manner. I experimented by removing the attached file through world settings (clicking on the X for "clear"). However, doing this and going back to the project itself found that the "next level" programming was still there, which is a problem. In computer programming, we call this "orphaning" data, and this is never a good thing and often leads to all kinds of illogical programming outcomes. So ... beware when adding next level to you game. I'd suggest slow and careful testing throughout your process so you can "intensely watch" how the project works and performs as you go along, pretty important since Kodu does not provide error messages to warn you of anything!

Painting in Sculptris, we found that if you make a creation too small with too many triangles, the "paint" brush won't work. The cool thing about this application is it operates using dynamic localized tessallation, a fancy way of saying that Sculptris lets you sculpt any way you want, following along to fill in any "holes" you might mistakenly make as you go. But, this leads to tons of overlap in the wiremesh, which the triangle count in the bottom left of your screen returns to you. You need, as you go along, to turn on the "wiremesh" tool and use the "reduce" brush to swipe over an area where you've added a lot of detail to bring down your triangle count.

Overall, I think we had more "delight" than "debug" moments over the past 5 weeks. As always, feel free to ask me questions by adding comments to this blog, and for Kodu bugs you find, the user forum is fantastic, so please use that, too. For example, take a look at this really helpful response from the Kodu team regarding another next level bug (fix = using "enter" at the end of a programming row if you don't get "+" to add "once" logic at the end) !