[racket] Doing collision detection in universe.ss

Ah, looking at scratchy more closely, I now think I understand it.
It's neat, but it's not quite what I'm looking for.  In particular, I
was looking for a set of libraries that made the kinds of things one
can do in scratch easy to do.  But scratchy is its own little
language, and doesn't give you access to lambda abstractions or other
tools of the trade of Racket.

That said, the functionality is all there, so maybe I can bend it to
my will somehow...

y

On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 8:00 AM, Matthew Flatt <mflatt at cs.utah.edu> wrote:
> For what it's worth
>
>  https://github.com/mflatt/scratchy
>
> is an implementation of the Scratch sprite and evaluation model plus a
> textual language. It has all of the drawbacks of Scratch --- mutation,
> race conditions, and busy waiting --- without the nice graphical
> syntax! It has a collision detector that's much like John's, but I
> spent some time making it go faster. There's also a notion of "lands"
> within a program.
>
> I wrote Scratchy as an example of building languages in Racket for this
> year's RacketCon.[*] I dream about a phase 2 where I figure out how to
> change the evaluation model to something good and/or connect with
> `2htdp/universe', but I don't see that happening soon.
>
> [*] At the suggestion of my son. He's a Scratch fan, though he quickly
>     became frustrated by the lack of abstraction in Scratch, and I
>     don't know whether to be happy or sad that he's a 12-year-old who
>     understands the phrase "race condition". Scratchy has "lands" because
>     he wanted something like that for his game.
>
> At Wed, 28 Nov 2012 07:37:27 -0500, Yaron Minsky wrote:
>> To be clear, I'm firmly interested in tinkering, which is why I'm
>> using universe.ss and image.ss.
>>
>> I do think that a good design goal for Racket's kid-oriented libraries
>> would be to be feature compatible with Scratch.  It would be great if
>> there were good ways of doing everything that Scratch can do, from
>> playing sounds to detecting collisions, to (more aggressively) on-line
>> hosting of the final result.  I'd love it if Racket were strictly
>> better than Scratch for someone who really can figure out how to
>> program, but it's just not true now.
>>
>> y
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 7:11 AM, Hendrik Boom <hendrik at topoi.pooq.com> wrote:
>> > On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 08:56:13PM -0500, Yaron Minsky wrote:
>> >> I've been weaning my son off of Scratch in favor of Racket, and trying
>> >> to get him to write interactive games using universe.ss and image.ss.
>> >> I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions for how to do things like
>> >> collision detection.  image.ss has these nice first-class images, but
>> >> I don't see a good way of querying two images to see if they overlap.
>> >>
>> >> Has anyone else had luck in doing this?  universe has a nice
>> >> programming model, but I've found it challenging to find simple ways
>> >> of doing the kinds of things that Scratch makes easy.
>> >
>> > There are two arts to collision detection: figuring out whether two
>> > images collide (which gets trickier when they're in motion) and
>> > organising all your objects so you don't have to test very many
>> > combinations of them.
>> >
>> > Both of these can get quite complicated, and are susceptible to
>> > nontrivial, complicated, and often necessary efficiency improvements
>> > depending on special properties of the game.
>> >
>> > A one-size-fits-all solution may be good enough for tinkering with, but
>> > serious use may well need serious hacking.
>> >
>> > -- hendrik
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