- Koala Bites
- Posts
- Issue 6
Issue 6
Tuesday Edition
David Skaife
February 13, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
⭐️⭐️In this issue⭐️⭐️
Koala Teachers Family Recap
Paper quizzes and Playground Stories
Why does my Playground take so long to load?
The importance of Canny to Koala Go
😑📘Koala Teachers Family Recap
Playground
🤨📰Paper quizzes and Playground Stories
The beginnings of this idea were from Emily Radecki. I thought people might find it useful so I expanded it out to what we have here. I already posted this idea some months ago, but with all the new teachers I figured it might be time to re-introduce the concept.
The play code is: 2750
Answer key is: 1-b,2-b,3-b,4-c,5-a,6-a,7-a,8-a,9-b,10-c
Playground nerd
🤓🛝Why does my Playground take so long to load?
The following is a list of answers from Ben Roux (co-founder and lead programmer for Koala Go) to some questions I had regarding how different objects in Playground affect load times and runtime performance. I originally asked in Facebook, but people can’t find it, so here it is:
Q1. When considering loading time, is a block of grass the same as a block of air? In other words, should I go back and trim unneeded blocks for optimum performance?
A1. The more solid blocks, the longer the loading time. But typically, even in the worst case, it’s still super fast to load the blocks. So I wouldn’t worry about that. The bottle neck is definitely the number of different images. (If you have few images but repeated a lot it will be fine!)
Q2. When rendering, is a flat surface better than an irregular surface? for example should I cover exposed stairs with a nice flat wall?
A2. Yeah for best real-time performance, flatter surfaces are going to perform better because I group blocks that form larger surfaces in a larger box which speeds up rendering.
Q3. I don’t see a message for the sounds loading, are they loaded in the same as images or just when they are needed?
A3. The sounds are loaded on demand. When you click play they will be loaded if they haven’t been played already.
Q4. Are the drawings treated the same as images when loading?
A4. They are not, drawings in playground are fairly lightweight unless you cover your entire playground with drawings
Q5. Do drawings or images take more resources to render, given a similar size of each?
A5. Images are the bigger resource guzzler. Especially if you have a lot of different ones.
Q6. Sticky notes seem to be a special case and a very underrated tool. How much better are they performance wise compared to drawings and images?
A6. Sticky notes Much much better than images! And slightly better than drawings.
Q7. Now for the 3D gem items, are they loaded like images or something more like blocks?
A7. 3D items are their own thing and can be very costly in terms of real time performance (they have a negligible loading time) especially if you have a lot of them.
Q8. How would you rate their render cost vs images and drawings?
A8. For real time (during the playground session):
Blocks < Stickies < drawings < images < 3D objects
For loading:
Blocks < stickies < 3D objects < Drawings < images
Editorial
🥫𝙴👍🏾The importance of Canny to Koala Go
For some time now the Koala team has been subtly guiding us toward Canny for suggesting changes or upgrades to Koala Go. You may have noticed, I will admit that I did not get the clue right away, lol.
Now I have finally seen the light. If you go and look at Canny and compare that to the list of new features implemented by Koala. You will see that the highest rated items on Canny are the ones that got implemented.
Why does this matter?
This means that the development of Koala Go is a very democratic affair. We get what we (as a group) ask for. We (as a group) need to start asking for the right things, for example:
I might be one of the biggest fans of pets and I’m looking forward to see how they develop, but for the community as a whole we might have been better off with a scheduling system instead. Don’t get me wrong, we can have both, but think about your priorities, because programmer resources are limited.
As an experiment, I propose that everyone who reads this and wants to play hide-and-seek in Playground go to Canny, make an account, and upvote that item. Even if you are not a fan of hide-and-seek do it anyway to be a part of the experiment, and have your Canny account ready to upvote other projects. So watch Fred’s excellent video on signing up and using Canny.
Then click the link below to easily upvote Hide-and-Seek, Thank you!
Hide-and-seek is a low-hanging fruit that has been hanging there for a long time. It sounds like it’s almost ready, but hasn’t been pushed across the finish line yet. If it were to be top rated on Canny I think we would see it very soon.
Submissions
📬Submissions
As always, if you have an article or how-to video or playground launch you would like to share in this newsletter, click the button and send me an email to discuss it.
Reply