[Sugar-devel] Physics activity development

[Gary C Martin]

On 24 May 2009, at 21:27, Alex Levenson wrote:

> I believe play/pause is implemented there.

Fab thanks, yes the spacebar is wired for play pause, so just a  
toolbar button needed for visual discoverability/shortcut hint.

> Also note that changing the menubar should be easy - I automated it  
> using class introspection so you should only have to make a few  
> changes and then all toolbar items will propagate nicely.

OK, your too clever for me, will need to get my head around this, I'm  
a little of an old school proceduralist ;-)

> We never got around to saving in Physics!, that's going to be a  
> significant bit of work (also considered a language independent  
> standard for saving box2d scenes) but I certainly did in x2o - it  
> plays nicely with the journal completely (at least when I left it  
> did).

Would you suggest we take a look at what you did for X2o and trying to  
duplicate your approach for Physics (I've not looked at X2o code yet  
so I'm likely off mark)?

Regards,
--Gary

> Alex
>
> On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 11:59 AM, Gary C Martin  
> <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
> Hi Brian,
>
>
> On 24 May 2009, at 18:36, Brian Jordan wrote:
>
> Hey all,
>
> Gary -- when you get a chance, can you add me as a committer on
> git.sl.o?  I'd like to help clean things up!
>
> You're added! :-)
>
> Can I request we try and make small clean commits and try to let  
> others know what we are doing. If you want to hack, Gitorious  
> supports quite a nice 'Clone repository' and then 'Request merge'  
> process (no commit rights needed for the main project). The  
> alternative, if you know what you are doing, is just make your own  
> local git branch to hack on, so you can take care of any merge/ 
> conflict issues yourself when you fold it back into the current  
> master.
>
> I'm far from a git expert, but I can recommend some bed time reading  
> at:
>
>        http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~cduan/technical/git/
>
> and/or
>
>        http://gitready.com/
>
> I'd like to get on with Labyrinth work, if you're willing to have an  
> initial clean up of the Physics source in the next few days... so  
> what was 'joysitck' feature all about? ;-)
>
> Once the dev.sugarlabs.org component is added we should add the  
> features/bugs in there to keep them all together. FWIW, from a UI  
> point of view I had in mind:
>
> 1) remove/disable 'joysitick' feature as I have no idea what it was  
> meant to be ;-)
> 2) build tool buttons correctly using RadioToolButton so they  
> display state correctly
> 3) use set_accelerator to define visible keyboard shortcuts for the  
> tools
>
>
> Asaf -- do you have a http://git.sugarlabs.org account yet?
>
> This is some feedback from Asaf (these could fit as enhancements in
> http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ ):
>
> While playing with the activity I found a "pause" button to stop time
> could be very useful. It's complicated to build elaborate contraptions
> if everything keeps falling. Maybe while everything is paused,
> positions an velocities of objects could be modified.
>
> A minor modification I suggest is to create a separate button for
> adding push pins. It is not intuitive to add them using the link tool.
> If there are plans about creating tutorial levels this isn't that
> necessary although I don't see any harm on adding it.
>
> An other thing I think could be grate is to be able to create
> attractors an repulsors. With stuff like this it gets pretty
> interesting, we could have objects orbiting around the attractors.
>
> Yes, all good stuff, there's also a list on http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Physics_%28activity%29 
>  as well, but I'd vote for cleaning up what we have first, perhaps  
> adding a play/pause, and keeping Journal state so kids can actually  
> keep their Physics creations (and send them to friends when using  
> sugar 0.84).
>
> Regards,
> --Gary
>
>
> Thanks
>
> Brian
>
> On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 4:17 PM, Gary C Martin  
> <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
> Hey Brian,
>
> On 24 May 2009, at 13:57, Brian Jordan wrote:
>
> Hey Gary,
>
> First, I'm attaching Asaf Paris Mandoki, who contacted me last week
> with an interest in developing on the Physics activity, and has great
> ideas of things to add.  This is a great opportunity!  :)
>
> I can handle getting Physics on gitorious, the bug tracker and a.sl.o.
> I will try to complete this by the end of today.
>
> Having chatted with Alex Levenson, I've already kicked off the  
> migration for
> Physics (rep is now in Gitorious, trac request is in, and I've  
> started to
> poke at the code, running well at least in sugar-jhbuild and sugar  
> 0.84).
> X2o is next on my hit list once Physics is in a reasonable state.
>
> The things I can use some help with are (1) integrating proper
> localization to the activity and
>
> Yep, I'm going to do a pass at the code and tidy up some partially
> implemented / broken UI stuff, before requesting it's addition to  
> pootle
> (best to start with a reasonably stable set of strings). Would also  
> like to
> get/text resolution independence (for non XO hardware) and get the  
> scene
> state saving to Journal...
>
> Want to get the basics out the way first before we break it again with
> exciting new features ;-)
>
> (2) figuring out a good way to include the pybox2d source in the git
> repository, while including an
> F9-compatible binary on a.sl.o (this was brought up w.r.t. Pippy a
> couple of times on the fedora devel lists, but I don't remember seeing
> a clear way of how to handle it).
>
> Yea I was worried this might be an issue needing resolved, it's not  
> my area
> of speciality, I'll need to take a deeper look at the source.
>
> Thanks for the ping and your help!!
>
> No, thank you! I was expecting a wall of silence :-)
>
> Regards,
> --Gary
>
> Brian
>
> On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 3:19 PM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com>
> wrote:
>
> Hi Guys,
>
> I'm making contact to see if any of you are still interested in
> developing
> your great Physics activity? Most of the active activity development  
> has
> now
> moved over to Sugar Labs infrastructure, and we've been getting some
> requests for localising Physics.
>
> We have a Gitorious based source repository (there's no admin request
> procedure, you can just register an account and migrate/create a
> project):
>
>      http://git.sugarlabs.org/
>
> Our bug-tracker trac is at:
>
>      http://dev.sugarlabs.org/
>
> For activity distribution, Sugar Labs is customising Mozilla addon's  
> web
> front/back end (we're trying to encourage activity developers to post
> there
> activity bundles here), it's still a little ugly but the theme/UI is
> still a
> work in progress :-)
>
>      http://activities.sugarlabs.org/
>
> If no one is available to help, I'd be happy to migrate Physics over  
> to
> the
> Sugar Labs infrastructure, get it added to pootle so we can start
> localisation and make sure bundles get released for easy download and
> inclusion in images/distrobutions. If someone finds they have some  
> time
> to
> come back later just ping me and I can easily add extra commiters;  
> though
> with Gitorious, any one can branch anything, hack a bit, then submit a
> merge
> request (great workflow for dipping in and out of projects).
>
> Kind Regards,
> Gary C Martin
> Sugar Labs Activity Team
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Team
>
>
>
>
>