Re: Re: Few suggestions from a new player

> I thought I'd respond to your concerns. Steve Orens has done a great
> job with this port, considering the limitations of the small palm
> screens.

Thanks for kudos. However, it was a joint effort. My partner, Chris Cotton
did at least 50% of the work on the game, including some of the more
difficult stuff like the neat zooming. We had many design sessions about how
to handle some of these issues on such a small screen. We definitely
understand that some of the functions are painful. Any suggestions on
alternative UI that might make difference, we're willing to listen to.

>> - Selecting fleets is a real pain when they are near or on top of
> the
>> name of a system.  It can take me 10 tries in some cases.
> 
> Click on a planet, then use the Show Ship Info command (from the
> menu, or type /S). The game shows you a row of dots on the bottom of
> the screen. Tap the first for the first fleet, etc. This works every
> time, so you don't have to struggle to tap the tiny ship icons. It
> would be nice if the first dot/fleet was selected as soon as you
> enter Ship Info mode, though. Also, when you Build a new fleet, that
> fleet should be selected immediately.

We can look into make the ship selected after building. I am not sure why
the first ship is not selected when you first enter ship mode. it sounds
like a possible bug since it seems intuitive to me that it should work that
way.

>> - Moving fleets in the above situation is impossible depending on
> the
>> zoom.  Instead of the fleet moving, you get the whole screen
> moving. 
>> The only workaround is to select the fleet (after trying 10x), zoom
>> out to max, give the fleet its orders, and then zoom back in.
> 
> I hear you, here. When moving a fleet, be sure to drag from the
> center of its planet to the center of the target planet. If you don't
> use the center of the planets, you confuse the game and get a scroll,
> rather than a fleet move. I always play in the middle zoom mode, and
> things usually work like I expect, but it did take some getting used
> to.

Yes, the scrolling v. selecting v. dragging was very difficult. I am not
very hopeful that we can make significant improvements in this area at this
time. The code was reasonably complex and previous attempts to fix or change
how it worked always resulted in a disaster and a revert. At the present
time, we think the current level of scrolling, dragging and selecting is as
good as it is going to get until we get the time to tackle a long, hard look
at the code. 

>> - Fleet management does not have the best interface.  It's the worst
>> part of the interface, in fact.  The Group Fleets screen is NOT
>> intuitive - maybe this is a smaller version of the Mac screen that
>> everyone knows how to use?
> 
> I agree that the UI isn't always intuitive, but I can't think of a
> better way to do it on the small palm screen.
> 
>  
>> --Documentation is poor.  The online documentation states "Spaceward
>> Ho! for the Macintosh comes with built-in help. To learn more about
>> Spaceward Ho!, download the Macintosh game."  This doesn't do me a
> lot
>> of good since I don't own a Mac.
> 
> I think Steve targeted the game toward players that were already
> familiar with the Mac game. I couldn't find any real help for the
> beginner, either. Maybe when I get better at the game I'll write an
> intro for new players. I'm a cowboy now with 930 points.

We put together an HTML tutorial on our web site. It is linked off of the
main Spaceward Ho page. Look for the text "How to Play". Here is a direct
URL:

    <http://palmgames.mobilefreon.com/products/spacewardho/readme.html>

Also, I thought we shipped that the download? Perhaps not. I admit, it has
been a while since I have looked at the download itself.

>> - It would be useful to click on a ship and see more info than the
>> offence/defense rating.  I hate having to go into the Organize
> Fleets
>> screen to have to set Delayed Arrival or Battle Attitude, or even to
>> find out what its range is.
> 
> This hasn't been much of a problem for me. Screen real estate is
> valuable on a palm game, and game writers don't want to waste it
> showing you info that you already know. Since it is expensive to
> design new ship types (something that took me a while to learn), you
> will usually not have many different types at once. So the
> offense/defense numbers are sufficient to identify your ships.
> 
> 
>> - Does the Mac version have the capability of multiple Armegeddons?
>> Seems to be a bit too powerful.  Just playing around with this (it's
>> fun to blow up half the galaxy) took me up 6 ranks in about 10
>> minutes.

A good question. I never thought to test what the Mac game does. In most of
my testing a single Armageddon usually wiped out so much stuff that the game
didn't last very long after that. We'll check it out. If it does seem to
unbalanced, we can limit it to one per game.

>> - There is a sporadic fatal exit when I try to leave the game to
> other
>> apps (I have a T3).
> 
> I havent seen the crash on exit, but I have seen an infinite loop in
> the $ screen twice. If I scroll in that screen with the stylus,
> rather than the up/down button, it can go into an infinite scroll
> loop, continually scrolling through the planet list, then starting at
> the top again. Reset is required.

The fatal crash we are aware of. Unfortunately, we have not been able to
reproduce this problem ourselves and all previous attempts to narrow down
the cause of this crash have failed. it is most vexing and we're super
annoyed by it. so much so that I am probably just going to have to by one of
the devices that has the crash.

The infinite scroll problem is a new one. I will have to look into that as
well.

Thanks for the input!

steve 

-- 
----------------------------------------------------
steve orens                    http://www.orens.com
                                    [email protected]
----------------------------------------------------






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