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Comment by emehrkay | Hacker News Reader

My son is finally make his space shooter the way he envisioned because of the new clone sprite action. Exciting times ahead, here is a pic of him getting down last night:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BJ3OudQCQAALZCc.jpg:large

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Tell your son to put the lamp _behind_ the screen. It will bless his eyes.

He already has the programmer lean. I see many good things in his future.

First time I've seen him sit like that

Slim jims and everything.

I'm looking at an empty beer bottle and a nutrigrain wrapper.

I had to implement some unsatisfying hacks to make my Scratch shooter work as well! If I remember correctly I was manually duplicating the master projectile and I had to register each projectile against each enemy.

Im not sure if clone works as expected though. He has a laser beam and it listens for a 'shoot' broadcast. When it hears it, a clone of 'myself' is made, it is placed behind the ship, and a loop moves it to the left. However, if 'shoot' is broadcasted multiple times, new clones are not made and the same laser beam is placed behind the ship. Maybe we'll put the clone logic on the broadcast portion and not on the laser itself. Programming is fun, I can't wait to nudge him to try that approach

One trick some people used was moving to several positions and "stamping".

Using Alice 2.2 (which also doesn't allow cloning/instantiation) my students had a similar issue, and solved it by using what they called "Megaman logic".

Megaman could apparently only shoot N bullets at once (3 or 5, I forget). Thus, they only ever had 5 bullet objects, iterated through a list to see if the bullet was shot or not, and only let you fire if there was a spare bullet.

I thought it was very clever. Sounds like you did much of the same thing.

Just so! I had three projectiles (rock1, rock2, rock3) and they shared a global "fire selector" that operated as a sort of mutex.

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s4/sh/90b814fd-df52-4fcf-9127...

Completely unrelated, but how old is that computer? Is it PPC or Intel? How well is it holding up?

It is an intel (I don't know the exact specs because he is using it right now). It is mainly a browser/netflix/homework/science project machine, he does, however, game on it. And I mean WINE game. Simpsons Hit and Run, Starwars Battlefront 1 & 2, he is really into Spore now a days. He does play Simcity 4000 or whatever the old one is from time to time. I was considering an upgrade or giving him my 13 macbook pro when I get something new. We've had it for 3 years and I can't ask of more from something that I got for 200$ on craigslist. Its funny because while he has a very capable computer on his desk in his room, he would much rather do every task on the iPad.

I honestly wasn't expecting you to see this and respond, so thanks a lot! I'm working on some machine lifetime prediction stuff for work, so it helps to hear about real-world cases.

It's a 2ghz core2duo with 2gb ram. Another impressive feature is the wireless speed. He streams HD video from the basement with no problem, while my newer computer struggles from time to time. This has been a great computer for him.

Whoa, totally misunderstood. This isn't a client you install anymore? Bonkers.

Yeah, we were searching for a good bit before we found the FAQ. It says that a downloadable version will come this summer

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