V10.4 has been released

10.4.0:

  • Notable Changes:
    • "Quicksteps" Evaluation - Dynamic Scheduling: Keep stepping non-animating processes between animation frames, makes "warp" and "turbo mode" largely obsolete for number crunching and improves musical thread synching
    • Floating point precision random numbers - pick a random float by entering an integer with a decimal point into at least one of the "pick random" reporter's input slots
    • reduced animation speed from 67 fps to 60 fps
    • disabled santa hats until next Christmas, still loadable as extension
  • Notable Fixes:
    • SciSnap file reader, thanks, Eckart!
    • fixed Beetle extension for extrusion and scaling, thanks, Bernat and Joan!
    • handle more cases of circularity in data structures more gracefully, thanks, blockpointstudios, for the report!
    • fixed #3429: Previously hidden generic WHEN hat blocks reappeared in v10.3
    • fixed a series of glitches handling customized primitives
    • fixed morphic Pen demo and "doIt" for inspectors
  • Translation Updates:
    • Armenian, thanks, Antrohoos Education Foundation!
  1. "Quicksteps" scheduling runs all non-animating parts of processes at "turbo" speed, and fills up every timeslot in between animation frames with as many "quicksteps" as the processor can handle, but staying true to Snap's concurrency model of atomicity / protected areas. As a result you no longer have to use WARP to speed up any loops that only crunch numbers, they are turbo'ed automatically, while other processes that animate stuff, and other parts of the same process are unaffected and keep running at animation frame speed. I'm joking to myself that Snap's scheduler has transitioned from a "marching" in step model to a "dancing" dynamically model, hence the name "Quicksteps". One caveat: Custom hat blocks (and the generic event / condition hat) will slow down quicksteps, because they need to be double-clocked (in fact, they're also "quickstep"-dancing, but at up to double speed so they can capture changes that occur in those quicksteps). That's why in projects that make use of custom hat blocks it may still make sense to use WARP even outside of animations. Of course, both WARP and TURBO mode are still useful if you want to speed up animations! One of the more dramatic side-effect of quickstepping is that polyphonic music, and music in general, is now significantly more in synch. Here's a quick little Quicksteps Demo Project.

  2. I've reduced the speed of animations from 67 FPS to 60 FPS. 67 FPS was a mistake that occurred somewhere along the past, and never should have been there. At 60 FPS Snap still animates at double the speed of Scratch. But some - especially un-timed - animations would run slightly slower. I hope people aren't going to hate it too much.

  3. picking a RANDOM number now lets you choose floats instead of numbers if you enter a decimal point somewhere. For example, if you want to pick random audio samples, you can now enter "-1.0 to 1.0" instead of "-1 to 0.999".

how?

He just made the santa.js file not load in the snap.html file. You can get it back by just creating a userscript with this

let el = document.createElement('script')
el.src = 'src/santa.js'
document.head.appendChild(el)

you can just load it as an extension:

santa_extension

Well, this is for a userscript, so people don't have to run that block every single time they open snap.

Wow, not German this time. Not that I complain about German being updated all the time, but I don't usually see any other languages being updated.
And I actually understand everything here, which is also unusual. :laughing:
EDIT: When I wrote that, I forgot about the "Notable Fixes" section... :~/
Also, there aren't any new blocks.

Jens is german!

I know. I understand why he updates German most often.

just as a heads up, this is not a smart script pic

It is, I think your browser might be stripping the metadata out.

what? why is it doing that?

This new quicksteps system sounds amazing! This will surely help improve performance for some projects, right?

I cannot drag it into the editor either.

I could, so...

PS: I'm on Chrome on Windows 10.

Im using firefox on arch
EDIT: will try chromium
EDIT2: doesn't work there either

https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=mark4sisb&ProjectName=untitled&editMode
This project will automatically load the hats (when you click on the link). I've updated my bookmark for Snap! to use it.
Edit: I used an extension to remove the blocks that were required to load the Santa hats. To peek at how I did it, use this link: Snap! Build Your Own Blocks

There is no XML in the data served by Discourse.
The URL of this image is https://cdn.forum.snap.berkeley.edu/optimized/3X/6/6/666a9f1e0ee66a1115051021e40784a2b4818ec9_2_517x36.png
It seems that image is "optimized" i.e. modified by Disco or CDN.
Other images are served from https://cdn.forum.snap.berkeley.edu/original/... URL.

Huh, on my phone I get the original image url.

https://cdn.forum.snap.berkeley.edu/original/3X/6/6/666a9f1e0ee66a1115051021e40784a2b4818ec9.png

Same, here on my laptop on Chrome.