MakeCode Helpdesk Stream this Friday! (4/10/26)

Hey you!

Yeah, you!

Do you have any questions about MakeCode? Is your project stuck on some bug that you just can’t figure out? Is there a game mechanic that’s been thwarting you? Want to know what @jwunderl thinks about Pokopia?

Well then you should come to livestream this Friday because we’re going to be doing another edition of MakeCode Helpdesk!

This is a special stream where you can ask us any questions and @jwunderl, @sarah, and I will do our best to answer them. If it’s a coding question, I’ll also be writing and handing out sample code that you can use in your projects! And if you weren’t aware, we are three of the developers who write MakeCode so bring all your technical questions too because we can probably help you out!

As always, the video will be available on YouTube afterwards! Can’t make the stream? Post your questions as replies to this post and we’ll pull from them when we run out of live questions!

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Yo sweet! Getting to stream depends on if I remember it exists (which is hard) so I’ll post this here just in case. I know you love audio, Richard, so this one’s for you!

Open if you dare (ooo so scary!)

I’ve been having some audio troubles in my kinda sorta music editor project with audio popping. I have been adding LFO effects and, as such, most sounds are made of a very long buffer of instructions strung together, each being 1ms in length (Sine wave LFO so I like having the most detail). I have so far been simply setting the first sound’s volume to 0, ramping to 50% of target volume and then making the second ms sound go 50-100. This solves about 80% of the popping. My question is basically this: Why is the audio popping random and not deterministic, and is there a minimum ramp-up time that could fix it, or some other way to fix it maybe?

PS: if you right click on an instrument you can see a rudimentary view of its volume plotted over time. The detail isn’t quite good enough to see every value the whole time, but it’s cool to see regardless, especially the very first instrument which has the strongest LFO.

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Richard will you actually fix the fancy text gray block bug or is it going to stay forever? What is one of your next extension ideas? Do you guys do Minecraft streams because I kinda wanna watch you guys do another one?

Finally what is each mods favorite MakeCode community game?

Will there ever be more colors, or an extension that adds more colors to makecode

Sorry that I asked the banned question

@codinggrizzlybear I think there is more colours. Can’t you just click assets, then click colours and change the colour pallete or make your own by typing in the hex code?

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Uh, YES? - Pokemon fan that can’t afford Pokopia.

You’re about to be smited (There’s no way that’s a word) by someone.

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would it be possible to make a PCM extension that plays machine audio? (not asking for someone else to do it for me, just wondered)

Feel free to save these 'til the end and if there is time in the episode.

Questions for filling time
  • What was your favorite CS course (grade school or university)?
  • Who and/or what influenced you to be software engineers?
  • How did you land at Microsoft?
  • How did you land on the MakeCode team?
  • What technical skillsets are you each currently developing?
  • What are your go-to reference books on your bookshelves (literal or virtual)?
  • What music is on your current playlists?
  • Which authors are you currently reading? What are your favorite genres?
  • If you could recreate one game in MakeCode Arcade, what would it be?
  • Comics (comic books, not comedians) — yay or nay? If yay, which characters do you like? What are you currently reading?
  • What is the oldest computer and/or console that you own?
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Yes.

Have fun.

All the details are in a comment inside of the game, and the problem is the lighting.

https://arcade.makecode.com/S76028-58355-43504-33349

Putting on onto that does anyone on the team watch anime or read manga?

Obviously from this post

Jwunderl would hate a ripoff poke-version of animal crossing and what’s up with them being a friggin ditto

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How connected is makecode with Microsoft? Do the higher-ups even notice you? Do you have, like, a budget? Basically, I want to know how the company works.

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im deciding whether I should join stream or not if I do join stream I will probably be either working on my game and just listening or actually watch and stuff but what do y’all actually do on stream (I usually watch your past videos and use them as tutorials since there’s not a lot of tutorals well before I joined the forums)

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I’ve been wondering if there’s an extension to shift between battles and overworld, like an RPG.

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Just some questions about the team.

  • What’s y’all’s opinion on Scratch (The programming language)?
  • How many extensions have each of you made?
  • Favorite block category?
  • When did you get your cats?
  • Favorite asset in the gallery?
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@richard (You probably get notifications from this topic anyway)
When I tried using the code from the demo you made me with the tilemap in my game it didn’t work anymore, I think it’s because the tiles are 8x8.
Here’s the project but with the same sprites and tilemap shape as in my game if you have time to help. (It’s probably something simple)

@CopySprite the issue is that you marked your platforms as walls in the tilemap. don’t paint walls on the fall through tiles

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Oh that was it? Thank you.

I guess I was right…

I think you were supposed to answer it on the livestream.