Using Pictures and Animation Clips in ToonTalk

Using Pictures and Animation Clips

The notebook on page 2 of your main notebook contains a collection of pictures and animations. You can just take one out, and if it is an animation, it'll start running. Some have more than one animation cycle that it can show. You can use keyboard commands to change which one is showing.

If you drop a picture (or animation) on another then Bammer will smash them together. They'll stay stuck together unless you use Dusty to pull them apart.

You can flip pictures over by pressing "f" while holding them. You'll see a big gray area on the back and a notebook full of remote controls and sensors will fly out. With these remote controls you can change where the picture is, how fast it is moving, how big it is, and how it looks. You can also find sensors that show you when the picture is colliding with something else. You can train robots to work with these remote controls and sensors and then put them on the back of a picture. Then you can give those robots the boxes they want. When you flip the picture over, the robots will start working and can give the pictures any imaginable sort of behavior. They might bounce, explode on contact, do a little dance or whatever. The "Ping Pong" demo shows two kids using these things to build a Ping Pong game.

Beginning with version 3.79 or Beta 43 you'll see a title bar with a miniature of the picture on the back of pictures. You can type a comment into this area.

Tip. You can flip a picture over and drop it on the back of another picture. This is much quicker than moving a bunch of robots and boxes from one picture to the next. It is a great way to "package up" a behavior and then give that behavior to lots of different objects.

Tip. You can bring your own pictures into ToonTalk using one of the sensors.

Tip. Most games are made using what computer scientists call sprites - little animation cycles that can move and behave. That's what ToonTalk pictures with robots on the back are.

Blank Pictures. You can use Dusty to make a blank picture. This is handy inside of thought bubbles when you want a robot to work on any picture.

Advanced Tip. You can make numbers and text act like pictures if you flip them over or make a blank picture and drop a number or text pad on top. You can even put robots on the back. The "Ping Pong" demo shows the kids making a score keeper by putting a robot on the back of a picture of a number.

Advanced Tip. You can put a bird on the back of a picture. This can be real handy when you use the sensor that shows what a picture is colliding with. If the nest of the bird on the back of the picture is in a box that a team of robots is waiting on, then this can enable any kind of interaction between colliding objects. For example, robots on the back of a rabbit could be waiting for a picture of a vegetable to appear on the collision detector. The robots can then vacuum off the picture (a copy of the vegetable that the rabbit is colliding with), spit it out, flip it over, pick up the bird, and give her a box to ask how it tastes. The box is taken to a nest on the back of the vegetable where a robot is waiting to answer such questions.