Version 67 - first beta!

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JohnM
Posts: 379
Joined: Sep 11th, '15, 14:42

Version 67 - first beta!

Post by JohnM » Jul 2nd, '17, 02:44

Welcome to beta test!

The latest version of GP, v067, is available at http://gpblocks.org/versions.

Note: With the advent of beta testing, the GP download location has moved. The old location on tinlizzie.org will no longer be updated with new versions.

This version makes two changes that may break or change the behavior of some existing projects. While we strive to keep GP stable, sometimes an incompatible change is unavoidable to make GP better in the long run. It seemed best make these two changes before starting beta test.

First, GP's angles now increase counter-clockwise, as angles do in math textbooks. That is, a 45 degree angle now slopes up going to the right. All blocks involving direction, such as 'direction to mouse' and 'set direction', have been updated accordingly. Old projects that use angles will still run, but the directions may be backwards or the sign of the Y component in trigonometry calculations may need to be reversed. The subparts of composite objects that rotate may need to be adjusted as well.

Second, the mechanism that used to broadcast an 'initialize' message to a newly created instance has been removed; an initialize method should be used instead. Any "when I receive 'initialize'" hat blocks can simply be replaced with "initialize" method headers created using the 'Make an initialize method' button in the "My Blocks" category.

In addition, the label of the "forever" block has changed to "animate". You won't need to change any scripts, but may notice that any "forever" blocks in your scripts now have the new label and you will no longer find a "forever" block in the palette. The reason for this name change is to stress that the "animate" block is intended specifically for animation (or for doing some action on every frame). Unlike all the other loops in GP, the animate block waits for the next frame at the end of each loop cycle. Thus, an 'animate' loop is not the same as a 'while true' loop. The animate loop runs at most 60 times per second while the "while true" loop can run tens of thousands of times per second.

There have been some minor changes in the ordering of blocks in the palette and a few more blocks are now only visible in developer mode. There are also some new blocks, such as 'isPrime' anda set of blocks for functional processing of lists (map/filter/detect/reduce). The latter blocks are in the "Functions" category, which is only visible in developer mode.

Finally, many of the demo projects have been tweaks and there are a few news ones.

Note for Mac OS X Sierra users:

Sierra has added additional security features. To run GP, you must first unzip it, then drag the GP.app file into the Applications folder. Then, select "Open" from the right-click menu. This should allow you to run it after warning you that its not from the Apple App store. I believe that once that's been done, you can drag GP.app back into the GP folder and put the folder anywhere you like. I have not yet upgraded to Sierra, so I can't test this myself. Let me know if you have problems. Many thanks to Mark Guzdial, who helped me debug this puzzling problem.

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