Click the flag to move the dots to random locations. Move the mouse to rotate. Thanks everybody for rating the performance of this. With a rating of 1 to 3, 1 being choppy and 3 being smooth, from a survey of 60 people the average is about 2.58! Not too bad. (It's actually a 2 for me.) Now we can use this as a very rough subjective performance benchmark. If this project runs a little choppy to smooth for you, and your project is smooth, you can be pretty sure it will run smooth on most people's computers. This has 15 dots. (I used MITscratcher's fast pen idea.) How I made it: I read up on "3d projection" and "matrix transformation". It took me quite a few websites and tinkering around to start to understanding it enough to make this work. It's about 11th or 12th grade level math. I used a 3d program called blender to draw the arena background animation and to figure out the camera position and zoom level I needed in the script so the backgrounds and the scratch program would match. When the program starts, every dot starts a script: it picks a random x,y,z location. (normally when you move a sprite you just have x and y. z is how far back it is.) Then in a loop, it takes the rotation of the camera, and how far it's zoomed in and converts the x,y,z location to your screen's x, y location, and moves the sprite there. Then it picks what costume to use: Big to little red dots- based on how far it is from the camera. (I could have used just one costume and changed the size, but that is slower.) Meanwhile: There is another sprite moving to every red dot with the pen down. the camera rotation is continually set to the mouse x. And the background frame is changed according to the camera rotation. I made the "Arena" the same on all 4 sides so that I can use the 30 frame animation 4 times in one turn, otherwise it would have been 120 frames. I hope that helps. It sounds confusing. I'll try to explain it better if there is interest. Also, I'm open to suggestions on how to make this better. I'd be honored if anyone was able to use any of my work in their project. Please don't just copy- try to make something new from it and at least give me a little credit in your project notes. Thanks scratch team for helping me finally start to understand programming.
