Behaviour of the _ to _ reporter from sensing category

[kbm_1]

Hello,
I watched the wonderful video " Mythen, Mathe, Metaverse" of Jens on youtube (Mythen, Mathe, Metaverse - Mut zu mehr MINTigkeit! - YouTube) and tried to build the algorithm of John Carmack demonstrated by Jens. First of all I was impressed by the "hidden feature" (I did not find it in the documentaion) of the working with lists as an input. The I played around and found the following (without changing anything on the stage):

and:

Is this a bug or a lack of understanding what the reporter actually does?

Best regards
Karl
.

[jens]

Thanks!
I've only recently "hyperized" the "ray length" feature, so this is still brand new. If the ray length reports -1 this indicates that the particular ray never hits the target object. In your specific example I would, indeed, expect both scripts to report the same result - if executed in the context of the same sprite, so, yes, perhaps this points to a bug I haven't yet discovered myself. If you come across any way to reproduce this please let me know, I'd love to investigate!

[edit]: Ha! You're right, this is most certainly a bug, excellent catch! I can reproduce it myself, looks like an internal type-casting glitch for literals (text vs. numbers). I'll let you know here when it's fixed (probably sometime tomorrow). Thanks!

[jens]

Karl, I've just now fixed this bug. You can check it out in the current dev version. Since we're currently working on some deeper changes this fix will take some weeks, if not months to make it into the main production release. Thanks again for the report!

[kbm_1]

Jens, thank you for the fast reaction and fixing that bug, I'll check it in the dev version.
Let me also say that I really like snap (I'm just starting to introduce it to my grandchildren) and especially your talks about it, it is a real pleasure to listen to them.

But (sorry for that) I found another irritating behaviour (especially for children): If you blockify a range of numbers which passes zero, you get the following:
blockified:
The zero field is always empty. Calculations seem to be correct, but would'nt it be better to fill the empty field with "0"?
Best regards
Karl

[ego-lay_atman-bay]

@kbm_1

The zero field is always empty. ... but would'nt it be better to fill the empty field with "0"?

I know, right?

Why does blockify not produce zeros

I was wanting to test out a neopixel gamma function from microblocks to see what values it should give and I blockfied the list result and was wondering why the zeros didn't make it across [image]

[pajamaclaws21]

@kbm_1

the working with lists as an input

What would this accomplish? What is the use of doing this? What does putting a list into the ray length reporter do?

[jens]

Ah yes, that's a bug on my list (see Blockify uses empty slots instead of zero · Issue #3180 · jmoenig/Snap · GitHub). I've just now fixed it in the current dev version. Thanks for reminding me!