Alice review
Alice is an open source IDE and programming language used to manipulate models in an 3D environment. You can even create games with it. It is aimed at students with no programming experience, with means simple animations can be created with ease.
Alice uses a drag and drop interface with the same general idea as Scratch. You start by creating the world by adding objects (which come with Alice) into the world. You then create programs by adding ‘methods’, such as moving an object, resizing an object or playing a sound, which are triggered by events, such as the start of the program, a key press or when a variable changes. There are also functions that return values, such as random number, the width of an object or the distance between objects. There are also while loops, conditional if/else and variables.
One of the downsides of Alice is the models and environment. Since Alice is a free project, it doesn’t get the same quality of models as games and other projects with funding for design. However, this will all change with version 3, as you can read below.
Alice announced last year that EA games had agreed to back the next version, and supply it with models and animations from The Sims, one of the best selling games of all time. Since the models from The Sims are of such high quality, it is likely Alice will become extremely popular. It has been 19 months since development of the new version has started, and a presentation from a conference this year said that it can be expected some time in 2008. In the new version of Alice, user can choose to either use the drag and drop interface seen in the current Alice, or use real java code.
Tags: Alice, review, open source, IDE, open source utils, program