Alice 3.1 Tutorial Part 1: Getting Started With Alice

Start Alice by double clicking on the Alice shortcut on your desktop.
When you start Alice, first a command prompt window will open (do not close this window) followed by Alice welcome screen.
First it will ask you to select a Template for your project or to open an existing project.

Select a Template

You can see four tabs in the above dialog box.

First one let you to select a suitable Template for your project. Second tab provides you access to your existing saved projects.Third tab will display your recent project and finally the fourth one helps you to open any project located in your system or in an external drive.

Click on the Template you would like to use for your project and then click OK button.

The Alice Interface

Alice Interface

When Alice is first started with a new template, the camera is the selected object, the Scene view displays the selected template scene, and myFirstMethod (the main method defined for a scene) is the open tab in the Code editor panel.

The Code Editor Interface where you create your programming instructions to move an object. Adding the programming instructions is simple as it involves dragging and dropping the instructions available in the method panel.

The Methods Panel has got three tabs:

1. Procedures: Lets you perform some kind of action. Instructions of moving, turning, rotating etc. for your objects are available here.

2. Functions: These methods let you interact with user, ask questions, get values and get user inputs. 

3. Properties: As the name indicates this provides access to the methods related to the properties or characteristics like opacity, height, colour etc. of the object concerned. 

But before doing the programming part, we need our actors in place. You can add the objects/actors required for your Alice animation by clicking on the Setup Scene button above.

Next: Adding objects to the scene