Algodoo

Thanks.

The plots are running 57.3 times faster than circle pointer since 1° is being interpreted as 1 radian.

Works well. Both actions (hide box and change circle color) can be done with a single key press. If you decide to go with a single key press, then to prevent the color circle from constantly changing wile the "w" button is held down, see Key input detector.

I expected that the circles would all start out at the same brightness and that "w" would increase the brightness of one circle slightly each time "w" was pressed. In that case you could get a measurement of your brightness sensitivity.

Another approach would be to not hide the circles. Each time a user clicks on what he thinks is the brighter circle, one of the four circles randomly becomes the brightest circle. If the user doesn't get n in a row correct, then the brightness gets incremented. The scene finishes when the user gets n in a row correct. The scene then reports a value of the users brightness sensitivity. n = 4 or 5 might be a good starting point.

Thanks. Fixed.

That's not true, but I know what you mean. Both scenes did display 100 when the colors matched. The problem was that widgets didn't allow exact matching of the colors due to the limited resolution of the widgets. Both scenes now allow a grade of 100.

Thanks.

I think I understand now. It's not about detecting the smallest perceivable contrast difference. It's about how your brain processes contrast differences when the sample time is short. I should have paid closer attention to the description.

Oddly satisfying.

Yes and yes. Maybe somebody can improve on the concept.

Thanks.

Nice work. I like your progress spinner. Increasing sim.frequency to 600 does the same thing as increasing the simulation speed to 10X.

First the bad news:

1. Spinner doesn't work after being saved as a phunlet. I suspect it's because the phunlet does not store "scene.my" variables. Initializing the scene.my variables in a onSpawn event should fix this.
2. The spinner behavior changes with sim.frequency. You can tie the elapsed time code to sim.time or (sim.tick / sim.frequency) to make it work independent of frequency setting. Set _oldTime or _lastTick to 0 in an onSpawn event.
3. The spinner will not work for long calculations in a single function. It will only work for calculations spread out over many ticks.

Now the good news:

The scene works perfect. I rated it it highly based on coding and visual appeal.

Xray: I don't believe that this can be used as a "phunlet".

Yes it can. Save a copy of the scene as a .phn. Open the .phn with a text editor. Copy all the scene.my variables to the Progress Spinner.phz segment 12 onSpawn event.

"One of the easiest optimizations you can make is to use the position of the last piece as a hint on how to scan. For example, if the last piece was dropped at row=4,column=3, then you only need to scan column 3 vertically and row 4 horizontally."

from: Connect-N game in C check for wins functions not working

If you do that, then you can show the score as the game progresses.

The text editor is used to see all the scene.my. variables in one place where you can copy and paste them into a .phz onSpawn event. For this scene, there's no problem knowing what the (3) scene.my. variables are, so the text editor is an unnecessary step. I had made the comment above while working on my Connect-n scene, which had more than 300 lines of scene.my code, so that's where my head was at.

Thanks for the comments and suggestion. I like your suggestion because it eliminates a keystroke but I am hesitant to use it because it is not typical text box behavior. The design time GUI has insertion blinking cursor that allows cursor forward and back navigation using the left and right keys. I'm not sure if I can (or will) make the insertion blinking cursor change to the run time GUI in this scene. I also need to figure a way so that users can differentiate between the Design Time GUI and Run Time GUI.

Q: Do you plan on using the Dragon Bar sliderless slider in any other scenes?
A: I hadn't considered it. I probably forgot about it.

Q: It would require a LOT of reverse engineering time for me to figure out how it works.
A: That may be true, but you don't need to reverse engineer much if you wish to modify the Widget behavior. For the slider widget, you just need to understand the 3 lines of code in the slider _onChange event. For the dragon bar and wheel, you just need to understand the 15 and 23 lines of code in the _doWhileActive events. Feel free to use any of my GUI widgets, most of the pertinent code is usually in an _onClick or _onChange event.

Thanks. See scene.my.check4winner for the "n in a row" checking routine. Use whatever code you want.

FYI,my granddaughter was over yesterday and I showed her my Connect-n game set up as 3X3 tic-tac-toe. She could care less and asked if she could play this game.

Nice work.

Q: What are the symptoms of a memory leak?
A: The scene could progressively slow down, Algodoo could unexpectedly close, or you could get a "not enough memory" message.

In this case Algodoo unexpectedly closed after I did a bunch of scene undo\start cycles. The way to check for a memory leak is to open the task manager and look at the memory usage for Algodoo. Undo\Start usually increases the memory slightly, but in this case the memory was increasing 5-6 times its original size.

Thanks guys.

Xray,
Good idea but don't hold your breath.

Thanks.

Nice work. I'm a big fan.

Thanks for the kind words and comment and not mentioning that the horizontal and vertical blanking bars were missing.

by me,

This scene was created after pondering the effect of sim.frequency on the apparent fan rotation in your 1948 Fresh nd Aire vintage electric table fan. It reminded me of vertical lock on an old TV.

Xray,

TVs were interesting to work on since the picture tube was sometimes the best diagnostic tool since what was wrong inside was usually apparent on the tube. I also remember warnings about you in the high voltage rectifier section.

We had only two TV channels. If you turned on the TV too early, all you would get is a test pattern. We also had to walk 5 miles to school in the snow and it was uphill both ways. Two out of tree of the previous statements are true.

I didn't answer the duck and cover statement since it all seemed to make sense to me.

Q: Wouldn't it make more sense to use Maxwell's equations for calculating magnetic forces?
A: I don't understand Maxwell's equations well enough to apply them to this scene. If you (or anybody else) do, then please post a response to this scene that is similar but uses Maxwell's equations.