Forums

Yus, that title is not a typo, the Programia blog officially has forums!  A few days ago I was looking at how crowded the scratch forums were, and decided to do something about it. The new Programia forum is just like the scratch forums, only it's easier to get you're projects featured.

How featuring on Programia works:

• Project stays up for a week
• Project is reviewed by me
• You get a love and fav from me
• Project is posted on the Programia homepage
• Project is put in the "Featured" tab
• Project is announced in scratch forums*
• Project is featured and announced in Programia forums

As you can see, there are a ton of things that are better.  Though there isn't too much publicity, this blog still gets about 1,000 views per week, (which isn't too bad :D). To use the forums, you do have to make a "Lefora" account, but that isn't that hard.  Anyway, I'd LOVE if you guys could submit projects, because I will happily display them.  So please participated and scratch on!

Link to forums (click here or simply click the tab at the top of my blog): Programia Forums

*Still working this one out with the scratch team.  Hopefully I can make it work.

5 Million Users!

For those of you who don't know already, scratch recently reached 5 million users!  Aah so exciting!  Just felt the need to say that.  Scratch on! :)

FPS?

Upon posting my previous post, I got some immediate questions about how I tracked FPS.
I decided to do a mini tutorial about how to track FPS on projects, because when developing, knowing your project's FPS can be very helpful.

How to add a basic FPS client on scratch:

1. First make 3 variables:

FPS
FPS Number
Test

2. Then, in each sprite (including the stage), put in this script:

3. In the "Stage" script, put in this script:

4. Also in the "Stage" script, put in:

5. Lastly, in the "set FPS to..." script, replace the "2" in "FPS Number / (1 + 2)" with however many sprites are in your project (excluding the stage script).  This is a key step.

Now you are finished.  This basically measures the total run speed of the project, and in turn tells you the frames per second.  If done properly, your FPS in a basic project should be anywhere from 20-30.  In my "Space" project, I had a high amount of cloned sprites, so it was around 10-15.  Anyway, I hope this helps you when developing scratch projects!  Enjoy!

~Rant

Dev Code!

Aaaaaaah!  I've been gone for so long!  Sorry, school has been eating me.  But I'm partially back now, so you can expect more posts. YAY!

Anyway, I'll get to the point:

Over winter break I was working on a simple project, and needed inspiration.  I had a random spaceship simulator, and didn't really know what to do with it.  I got a random idea to add a development console, which basically shows stats about how the project is running. I made this post to essentially say that in all my future projects, if you press the keys "d", "e", and "v", or "dev" at the same time, it will show the development console.  Try it out on my space simulator below!