Turning an Arm on a Person???

Using Storytelling with Alice, I placed a "Coach" object into the virtual world and attempted to turn his left arm forward. The arm went behind his back instead of in front of him as I would have expected. The "blue" line on the arm stuck out in the direction he was facing, so I thought a forward turn movement would be in that direction. What is strange is that if I tell the Coach torso, which also has a blue line sticking out in the direction he is facing, to turn forward, it DOES turn in the direction the coach is facing.

I am not sure what I am missing here?? Can anyone help??

Thanks in advance for any help, Ryan

Originally Posted by stlocin

Using Storytelling with Alice, I placed a "Coach" object into the virtual world and attempted to turn his left arm forward. The arm went behind his back instead of in front of him as I would have expected. The "blue" line on the arm stuck out in the direction he was facing, so I thought a forward turn movement would be in that direction. What is strange is that if I tell the Coach torso, which also has a blue line sticking out in the direction he is facing, to turn forward, it DOES turn in the direction the coach is facing.

I am not sure what I am missing here?? Can anyone help??

Thanks in advance for any help, Ryan

Since I can't see your code, I can't determine the source of your problem. Also, I haven't done much with storytelling Alice because I frequently can't get it to run.

However, you will find a couple of tutorials in my set of free online tutorials that specifically discuss movements of the coach's left arm in Alice 2.0, as well as the behavior of the turn and roll methods relative to the red, green, and blue axes. I recommend that you copy the code from those tutorials, port it to Storytelling Alice, and see if the behavior for Storytelling Alice matches the behavior that I describe in the tutorials for Alice 2.0. If so, you need to think more deeply about how to control the arm correctly. If not, you may have found a bug in Storytelling Alice.

Dick Baldwin
Free Alice tutorials: http://www.dickbaldwin.com/tocalice.htm
Free programming tutorials: http://www.dickbaldwin.com/toc.htm

One fact about Alice is that the various characters do not have common coordinate references - even for such things as center of mass, let alone for rotational directions. Getting the movement right is largely a matter of trial and effor for each object.

I don't classify this as a real problem since it comes from the same fact (many uncordinated groups creating models) that also gives Alice it's rich character set. It's also illustrative of what can happen when there isn't a common programming specification - not a bad lesson for beginning programmers.