Block and other Ideas

[sullydux]

Hi, I’m someone who enjoys creating projects on Scratch because it makes it easy to build and share games with an integrated viewport. I have a few feature suggestions:

Block idea one – encode/decode:
Add blocks to encode and decode text, converting a string of letters/numbers/symbols into a string of only numbers and back again. This would save storage and time for projects that rely on cloud variables or save codes. Here is an image of what I mean.

Block idea two – FPS reporter:
Add a reporter block, similar to the “timer,” that reports the current FPS. This would help creators profile performance and optimize their projects. Here is an image of what I mean.

List appearance editor:
Add a list style editor so lists can be displayed in different visual styles such as regular, retro pixel, futuristic, or other custom themes. This would help lists better match a game’s art style instead of always using the default look.

Thank you for your time and all your work on Scratch. If you are interested, you can also check out some of the games I’ve made, which are packaged into this website.

[supervoidcoder]

Shouldn't this be better off in the official Scratch Forums on the main website? https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/1

[sullydux]

@supervoidcoder There is more activity here by people who have control over this stuff. I put it there too.

[supervoidcoder]

@supervoidcoder There is more activity here by people who have control over this stuff. I put it there too.

Yes, but it's probably not the best idea to advertise your Scratch games to the literal Scratch engineers. It's just... I don't know, it seems better suited for a forum signature, and this isn't a forum. It'd be more helpful to either just make the forum topic or do it here on GitHub but provide the code yourself

[supervoidcoder]

Either way, some of your ideas might not be considered by the Scratch Team:

Block idea one – encode/decode:
Add blocks to encode and decode text, converting a string of letters/numbers/symbols into a string of only numbers and back again. This would save storage and time for projects that rely on cloud variables or save codes.

This would be helpful, but the whole reason why Scratch made it so that cloud variables could only store numbers is so that it would prevent chatrooms and other inappropriate cloud-based projects. The encoding process is simply a workaround, which makes it a gray area.

Block idea two – FPS reporter:
Add a reporter block, similar to the “timer,” that reports the current FPS. This would help creators profile performance and optimize their projects. Here is an image of what I mean.

Now this sounds useful, but it seems like it's a

1. list of suggestions
2. dupe

Either way, this is called delta time. It is pretty useful but there's probably already a suggestion for it in the forums.

[sullydux]

ok, I get the reason why no idea one.

[playforge-coding]

Someone should close this