VectorStorm Blog

Here’s an interesting thing I’ve learned from playing around with GUI stuff on the iPhone and iPad (and I expect this to carry over to other touchscreen surfaces as well):

On a finger-based touchscreen, it’s much easier and less stressful for a user to press buttons which are tall and narrow, than to press buttons which are wide and short.

Desktop computers and the Internet have made us all really comfortable with wide and short buttons.  We think of buttons in that capsule shape because the text labels that we put into the buttons tend to be wide and short as well.  But on touch surfaces, it’s tricky to see which part of a finger is going to touch the screen first, and so just precisely how high on the screen our touch is going to be.  By comparison, we can be pretty certain where the touch will happen horizontally.

With the two interfaces shown here, I’ve found that it’s far, far easier for someone to press the tall+thin buttons on the right than the wide+short ones on the left, even though the buttons on the left are much larger on screen (that is, they contain more pixels).

As a fun side-note, further testing suggests to me that square buttons are best when a stylus is being used instead of a finger.

Obviously, none of this has been rigorously tested in a scientifically valid way.  But in hindsight, it seems obvious that the ergonomics of finger-based and stylus-based touchscreens would work out this way.

Anyhow, just thought I’d throw it out there, in case it was a new idea to anybody else.

I’m not sure whether I’m going to keep posting these videos here to my blog.  I guess I probably should, at least for the immediate future.  Regardless, they’re also going to be posted over on the VGKnowHow site.  There’s also now a permanent link at the top of the VectorStorm site.  Once I have one or two more videos up, I’ll open up the YouTube channel as well, for folks who like to subscribe to things over there.  Just feels a little silly to have a “channel” for what’s currently a single video, you know?

Next week, we’ll be doing the fundamentals of game cameras.  I expect that I’ll be using a customised version of MMORPG Tycoon 2 to demonstrate that.  Will be shooting to have it up a week from today.

Please do give feedback!  (And note that this was shot before I received any of the feedback you guys gave for the ‘Introduction’ video, so please don’t think that I ignored you!  :D )

So I mentioned yesterday that my goal for today was to have guests extrapolating their lies a bit better, so they could tell lies which included information that they were only guessing at.  However, with holiday stuff going on, I actually didn’t get a whole lot of coding time to make progress on that front.

I did get time to look into a few other things, though.  Today I fixed some issues which would allow guests to choose to “move” from a room into that same room, which sometimes led to guests spending hours in just one spot, or wandering back and forth between two spaces in a single room.  I also set it up so that guests wouldn’t ever stand in the same spot as another guest (either factually, or in their lies).  This was necessary just because of the graphical way that the information is presented;  the player will find it difficult to tell what’s going on, if two guests have their tokens drawing on top of each other!

Finally, after some extensive testing, I think I’ve decided that the game works better only being able to see one guest’s testimony at a time, instead of overlaying multiple testimonies together so that the player can see differences between the guests’ stories at a glance.  This is more like the original Nicholas Spratt game, but is still a good easier to use because you now have buttons to select exactly which guest you wish to question, instead of having to cycle through the guests in order.  In my own opinion, this back-and-forth checking process feels more “detective-y” than either the original Spratt game or my “automatically overlay everything” mechanic.  On the other hand, I could use the “overlay” behaviour as an “easy” mode;  that’d be pretty trivial to wire up, and it does point out the contradictions more obviously.

Incidentally, I still don’t have a title for this game.  Since the iPhone/iPad can only display a maximum of 11 characters for an app’s name, “The Incomparable Deductions of Police Constable Sir Nicholas Spratt” wouldn’t quite fit under the icon.  I’ll probably use that as the subtitle.  Maybe I’ll just call the game “Spratt 2″ for the time being, until a proper title occurs to me.

So yesterday, the obvious giveaway that a suspect was lying to you was that he suddenly wouldn’t see anyone else, even if that someone else was in the same room with him just a moment ago;  if he was lying about where he was going as he left the room, then he’d forget that other character was still there in the room with him while he was walking to the door.  It was like the very moment at which the suspect decided to lie, he forgot about everything that he knew was true.

I have now fixed that problem.  Now, when a suspect lies, he takes into account everything that he knows.  That is, if he’s leaving a room and lying about where he’s going to, he’ll report seeing everyone in the room that he actually saw in the room on his way to his actual destination.  Similarly, if he claims to be passing through one room on his way to a second room, he’ll make use of anything he really saw if he could reasonably have also seen it during his lie.

The new problem is that the suspect won’t make anything up.  That is, if in fact he spent five seconds passing through a room, but his lie has him taking a longer path (say, ten seconds), then he’ll only claim to see the people in the room for five seconds;  they’ll mysteriously vanish for the other five seconds, where he claims to have been in the room, but actually wasn’t.

This, of course, makes the lies still be pretty easy to spot.

But I’m getting closer!  The next bit to implement is going to be having the lying guests make guesses about where the other guests would have been, if they could have seen them.  That is, they’ll realise if they should know where a guest is, but don’t, and will try to make up facts to fit their lies.  With this last piece in place, it should at last be much more tricky to spot the lies;  you’ll actually have to compare testimony, instead of simply looking for impossible claims within one person’s own comments.  That’ll be tomorrow, I hope!

Just a few quick notices:

• I think I’ve re-fixed integration between the blog and the forums;  should no longer require re-logging in when you switch from one to the other.
• I’ve deleted a rather staggering number of accounts which had never posted anything to either the blog or the forums.  (About 4000 of them;  we had been accumulating them at a rate of around 8 per day for the last year or so, due to the unsecured “register” link over on the forum side).  If I’ve made a mistake and accidentally deleted your account, please let me know (and re-create it!)

I have a forum installed for the VGKnowHow series as well, but that’s not properly locked down yet, so I’m still not quite ready to post a link to it.  But it’ll be going live sometime before the next (ie: first) video, which will be sometime in the middle of next week.  Possibly on the Tuesday.  Eventually I’ll settle into a routine schedule for these things, but I’m not quite well enough prepared yet.