Collaboration
 

While working on an Alice project with a team, I have discovered that it is immensely difficult and annoying. This is because of several reasons.
First of all, there is no way (at least that I know of) to copy code between two alice worlds. The clipboard works solely for the world that is currently open and running, and even running multiple applications does not make it possible to drag or copy code between them.
Second, there is no way to merge worlds. I understand that this can be near to impossible with all the various objects in a 3-dimensional environment, along with various variables and methods. However, I think that effort should be put towards making it possible to merge code.
Currently, if multiple people are working on an Alice world, they are forced to work on one machine. Otherwise, their versions of the world branch off into various versions, and the only way to put them back together is by manually copying code: by looking at one screen and writing new code on another.
If the two issues above would be solved, so many more possibilities for teamwork and collaboration within the Alice society would open up.

Imagine- a team working on a game each take a copy of the world home for the weekend. Meeting up on Monday, they are able to merge all the work that they had done into a full, newly revamped program.
Currently, they have to spend several days of work time to manually copy the code, time that they could have used to finish the world.

Imagine- a new user finds it difficult to create collision detection in his world. He finds a world created by another user that is openly shared on the Alice Community and accomplishes the necessary task flawlessly. The user is able to copy the code to his world without any hassle, thus allowing him to proceed to other areas of development.
Currently, such a user has to spend hours trying to manually recreate some code that another person wrote in 5 minutes, only to discover that it requires a use of something called variables that he has never heard of before.

Allowing possibilities such as these could open new frontiers for collaboration. New users could be able to more naturally see and learn specific complicated functions or methods that actually work in their own world, affecting their own objects. Experienced users could be able to create a collaborative project, where they all work individually on complex parts, only to fuse all the worlds into one, almighty, epic world that could be seen as the Holy Grail and ultimate example of Alice achievement! (sorry for the slang :], I get rather emotional)

Please, consider this. Thank you.
~JustasM~

Hear! Hear!

Hopefully Alice 3.0, being true Java, will solve the problem - which I agree is a discouraging "feature" of the current version.

Copying code
 

There is a way to copy code from one world to another. First get all of the code into one piece, such as a "do in order". Then copy it to the clipboard. Do not try to copy an entire method from the properties tab, this will not work.

After that is done, go to File>Open World and open the world you want to paste the code into. The file you copied to the clipboard should still be there. Create a new method, if necessary and drag the clipboard to the method.

However, this will only work if all the objects are already in the world. You cannot copy an object from one world to another, and cannot copy a method that has references to an objects that is not there.

[QUOTE=ottar9919;8998] You cannot copy an object from one world to another ... [/QUOTE]

I'm sure I'm taking this out of the context in which you wrote it - but just to clarify your posting, you can, of course, save any object from a world (as an .a2c file) and then inport it into another world.

[quote=DrJim;9016]I'm sure I'm taking this out of the context in which you wrote it - but just to clarify your posting, you can, of course, save any object from a world (as an .a2c file) and then import it into another world.[/quote]
Yes, you can. I am saying that you cannot copy an object and place it in the exact same spot, facing the same direction, etc..

[QUOTE=ottar9919;9147]Yes, you can. I am saying that you cannot copy an object and place it in the exact same spot, facing the same direction, etc..[/QUOTE]

Actually, you can (see attached). It's a bit of a pain :( - but far better than setting up a complex world each time.

Poses, numeric parameters and methods save with the character fine. For the position, you have to save the offsets from "ground" which is (0,0,0) and then, as the first line in your program call the method saved with the object to do a move command.

I haven't tried for orientation, but would first try saving three angles for a set of rotate and turn commands. I believe there is a way to actually set orientation - but that gets into more math than I really want to do. :)

Oh, cool. I knew you could set the position, but I had never thought about using it when copying an object. It would still be hard though.