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Acknowledged. This will be fixed soon. Thanks

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Introduction

When you need to explain how a project should work, the best way is to make a screen recording of the stage. This short article will explain which tools you can use to record the screen, and also how to share the gif file to get a URL for it.

Screen Recording on Windows

If you are using a Windows computer, we recommend a free tool named “ScreenToGif”, which you can download here: https://www.screentogif.com/

Here is a short video explaining how to use it: https://www.yo utube.com/watch?v=ELfCBzN1Mtc

Screen Recording on Macbook

If you are using a Macbook, you can use a free tool called “Giphy Capture”: https://giphy.com/apps/giphycapture

Here is a short video showing how to use it: https://www.yo utube.com/watch?v=m-4cJMBGfS4

Share your gif file

Once your gif file is ready, you can share it this way:

Go to the “My Stuff” page at https://play.creaticode.com/mystuff, and make sure you are logged in.
Select “My Files” tab on the bottom left
Click the “+Share a New File” button on the top right
In the pop up window, click “Click to upload file”, and then select the gif file from your computer.
Click the green button that says “upload and share with the CC Attribution license” at the bottom.

After that, you will see the new file in the list of files, and then you can click “Copy file URL” button for that file, which will copy the URL to the clipboard, which would look like this: https://ccdn.creaticode.com/user-files/BfemEPCxatY6MMAPs/castfireball.gif

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If you are looking for a particular 3D model that is not in our library, please reply to this topic. If you can include an example picture of it, it would be more clear what you are looking for. We will try to fulfill these requests as best as we can. Please make sure you do not submit duplicate requests by searching for it first.

Thanks
CreatiCode Support

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Introduction

In the costumer editor, when the costume is in bitmap mode (as opposed to vector mode), you can use the magic wand tool to select an area with similar colors, then delete the designated area or fill it with a new color.

Making a Selection

To make a selection, you simply need to select the magic wand tool, then click on the area you would like to select. It can be of any shape, and may even contain holes in it:

Behind the scenes, it uses a “flood fill” algorithm to expand the selected area into neighboring points, so long as their colors are similar to the point you have clicked.

Note that if your computer is slow or if the costume is big, then it will take longer for this tool to determine the selected area.

Changing the Tolerance Threshold

When the magic wand is selected, you can specify a tolerance threshold value. Its value is between 1 and 255, and by default, it is 5. This value represents how much difference in color it would tolerate when it tries to expand the selection area:

When the value is low, it will make sure the selected area only contains points very similar to the point you have clicked;
As the value increases, it will include more points even if they are more different from the starting point.

As shown, when you change this value, the selected area will be updated automatically:

Delete or Fill the Selected Area

After you have made the selection, there are 2 operations you can do with those points:

You can click the “Delete” button or press the DELETE key to delete all of those points;
You can also pick a color from the “Fill” dropdown, then click the “Fill” button to fill the selected area with that color.

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Hi all,

Sorry there was an outage on our platform earlier this morning. Sorry about the inconvenience. Now we are back online.

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CreatiCode

@jeffreyrb03-gmail

You are right. We should allow users to submit new extensions.

However, the code snippet library should be more like backpack than extension, since it will allow users to modify the code blocks after a snippet is imported. If it is an extension, then users won’t see its implementation and also won’t be able to customize it.

CreatiCode

Introduction

In MIT Scratch, you can already manage dates using the “days since 2000” block. However, if you need a more granular control of date and time, you can use this new block:

This block will return the number of seconds that have passed between the given timestamp and the beginning of 2000.01.01.

Input Format

The input is a timestamp, which contains the date, a “T”, and then the time. The date is represented as year:month:day. The time is represented as hour:minute:second. Each field has to be 2 digits, except that the year has to be 4 digits.

The timestamp is assumed to be the local time of the computer that’s running this program. If you want to use the UTC time, which is the same across the world, then append a “Z” at the end of the timestamp, such as “2024.01.01T10:00:00Z”.

If the input is left empty, then the current time is used:

Calculating Time Difference

With this new block, you can easily calculate how many seconds are between 2 timestamps. You just need to run this new block for both timestamps, then calculate the difference between them:

Converting to Date

You can also convert the number of seconds back to a Date object. For example, the program below first gets the number of seconds for a specific timestamp, then create a date object using that result, and we get the same timestamp as our input:

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Introduction

You learned about Single-Point Particle Emitter, which generates particles from a single point in the 3D space.

In this article, we will discuss “shape-based” emitters, which generate particles from within a 3D shape like a box. They allow us to produce very different visual effects.

Box Emitters

The box emitter is simply a transparent 3D box, and it can generate new particles from any random point inside this box. We can not see this box since it is transparent, but we can indirectly see its shape by where the particles are generated.

To use the box emitter, we need 2 steps:

Select the “Box” shape when creating the emitter
Configure the size of the box by its minimum and maximum X/Y/Z positions

Here is a simple example:

This program creates a box emitter that is 400 units in each dimension. For example, in the X dimension, the minimum is -200 and the maximum is 200, so the x position of new particles can be any random value between -200 and 200. When you run this program, you can see the particles are all confined within this box-shaped region:

Sphere Emitters

The shape of the emitter can also be a sphere. When we configure the sphere shape, we can set its size using the “radius” parameter.

There is also a “range” parameter (between 0 and 1), which controls the range of possible values along the radius. You can think of “range” as “thickness”:

When “range” is 0, the particles will only be generated on the surface of the sphere, and not inside it.
When “range” is 1, the particles can be generated at any random point on the surface or inside the sphere.
When “range” is between 0 and 1, the particles will not be generated near the center of the sphere, but can be generated on the surface or near the surface.

Here is an example program with a range of 0:

As shown, particles are only appearing on the surface of the sphere:

Hemisphere Emitters

Hemisphere emitters generate particles from a half-sphere shape. You can specify its radius and range the same way as the sphere emitters.

One thing special about hemisphere emitters is that we can rotate the half sphere to different directions. As shown below, when we rotate it around X-axis for 90 degrees, the new particles are all generated at the bottom half of the sphere:

Cylinder Emitters

The emitter can also take a cylinder shape. We can control the radius of the circle, and also the height of the cylinder.

The “range” parameter also works for cylinders. You can think of it as controling the “thickness” of the cylinder’s skin. For example, when radius 0.5, the thickness of the cylinder skin is half of the radius:

The cylinder shape also supports an additional parameter of “direction randomness”. This only matters when we set the particles to not face the camera all the time, and we will see the particles facing different random directions when we set “direction randomness” to 100:

Lastly, we can rotate the cylinder emitter as well. For example, we can make it “lie down”:

Cone Emitters

For the cone-shaped emitter, we can console these parameters:

Radius: The radius of the bottom circle of the cone
Angle: The opening angle of the cone. Note that the angle and the radius would imply the height of the cone, so we won’t need another “height” parameter.
Radius Range: This range value applies along the radius direction. When it is 0, the particles will only be generated on the surface of the cone. When it is 1, the particles may come out from anywhere inside the cone or on its surface.
Height Range: This range value applies along the height of the cone. When it is 0, the particles will only emerge from the bottom of the cone, and when it is 1, the entire height can generate particles.

We can rotate cone emitters as well.