Request for developer feedback re: field-test crashes, snafus, video issues, and other questions

[michae...@gmail.com]

Greetings,

I scrolled through the last year of post topics to see if it would make sense to follow on with an existing thread but decided to bundle the following specific observations from a recent field-test of our ARIS game in development, Water Story MKE. I am grateful for anyone chiming in with tips, similar experiences, or solutions to some bugs we observed. I am also posting some larger-scale framing questions that will be relevant to our effort in the future, and perhaps others have insights here as well.

CRASHES

1. One of our field-testers with an iPhone 6 was unable to create an ARIS log-in on Saturday, 27 August 2016. She attempted this with three different usernames, all with the same crash point. After she took the ARIS selfie, upon hitting "use this image" for her profile, the ARIS app would entirely crash. We tried reinstalling ARIS twice and switching the default language on her phone--hers was set to French initially--but all to no avail. I watched her do this process twice and did it once myself, so it seemed we were taking the right steps. Subsequently she texted to me that she updated her iOS, but experienced the same trouble. I am attaching the technical specs of her phone as a screenshot here. Not sure what the issue is. Have others experienced something similar?

2. One of our field-testers with an iPhone 4.was unable to get our game to load. He was able to create an ARIS player account without problem, but then loading our game media--both through his 4G network and later through a Wi-Fi connection--resulted in a stalled upload. Upon restarting ARIS, the upload would recommence, but never complete. Finally, new attempts would not even recommence the upload but instead crashed the app. Has anyone experienced something similar? Is the issue the age/capacity of his phone? Other testers with 5's and 6's did not experience this problem, but we also do not know his data plan limitation, although I did check and his phone itself had enough space to load our media had the upload completed. (Our game currently pre-loads on the order of 200 MB of media. We go with pre-loading all media because in earlier tests where this was not selected, users would experience video lags that disrupted the player experience. Our users who could get the app to load did not experience any video lags.)

3. One of our field-testers who used her iPhone 5 to successfully play our game subsequently would experience a crash whenever she went to her inventory. The game worked fine except for that. I suspect this fault may be with some of the game programming on my side of things--if for example there's some crazy loop involved with an inventory item that I did not anticipate--but perhaps others have experienced this problem? Crashing occurred on repeated tests whenever she would access her inventory. We reset the game and had the same experience, but only tested this a few times, each time resulting in the inventory-access ARIS crash. Others did not report this issue, and I do not experience it when I check my player inventory using an iPhone SE.

VIDEO ISSUES

4. I've noticed that videos in ARIS display some unique properties depending on how they are accessed. Some background on our case: Our videos are currently horizontal 16:9 videos featuring actual content that is vertical 9:16 centered within the frame. I did this because we shot our interviews vertically--initially thinking of how they would display on an iPhone and not realizing that the ARIS video interface forces one to default to horizontal videos... When viewed as the media associated with plaques, the user can double-touch the playing video and it fills the entire 9:16 phone screen. This is somewhat awkward, but acceptable and our users quickly adapted their behaviors to double-touching to enlarge the video. So I can live with that. (If there's a way for vertical video to show up as vertical and not horizontal, however, this would be much appreciated.) 

5. However, when the same videos are viewed as media objects associated with a game object--for example, I have the plaques disappear after they've collected the interview and have the videos themselves show up in the player inventory as discrete objects also associated with the video file--there is no possibility for zooming/enlarging. The videos play, but they are locked in the small 16:9 screen in the middle of the 9:16 phone screen. In my case, this makes the viewer see a tiny 9:16 vertical rectangle in the middle of their huge 9:16 screen. Our video is unwatchable at this zoom. I have noticed that the same issue occurs when "autoplay" is selected with the media files even when they are connected to plaques. The video in the plaque will indeed autoplay, but there is no opportunity to enlarge it to full screen. It's locked inside that small 16:9 horizontal rectangle. What can be done about these situations? Suggestions or solutions?

OTHER QUESTIONS

6.  I've used the javascript for a game leaderboard and it works, which is quite useful. However, on our field test I noticed that it only shows the top 10 player scores. I revisited the javascript pasted from the rupees example, but do not find any area to easily modify the number of scores displayed. This is slightly beyond my ken but aimed at those more familiar with code. Does anyone know of a way to show all player scores instead of the top 10? 

7. Our field-test included a modest number of player-users. I am wondering about the server capacity of ARIS to handle multiple clients simultaneously. For example, we are planning two events for 2017, one at which we expect on the order of a hundred discrete users engaging with the app at the same time. For another, we are anticipating as many as 250 discrete users all tapping into the game at once. Assuming the other technical snafus can be reasonably addressed and not accounting any problems arising from users with varying data plans, should we be concerned about this? Is there a technical capacity limitation to how many users ARIS can handle on one game at one time? What have others experienced about the most users of one game at one time?

8. Siftr & ARIS

I've posted earlier about my issue on connecting Siftr and ARIS, but suffice for this post to say that we experienced a failure of the URL to a unique Siftr page to be accessed as a web object within our ARIS game. The link goes through to Siftr but does not carry with it the user's login info or flow to the precise Siftr that it should. Not sure if this issue is on the ARIS or the Siftr side of things.

I appreciate any responses to these observations and questions, hope they are not redundant, and I also hope that they create meaningful conversations that benefit the entire ARIS community. Thank you for reading this post. If anyone wants to get into the weeds on one of these, feel free to contact me directly.

Cheers,

Michael Timm

[Christopher Holden]

These are really great notes. Thank you for taking the time to make them available, and to undergo the frustration in use which caused you to encounter these issues in the first place. I don't have a lot of answers at the moment but I think this paints a good picture of where pain points in ARIS are for intense use and media creation especially.

4,5. There are some ways developers could improve media playback within various objects, and the only other solution I can think of is to use webpage objects and load and prep the media using html and javascript. This may get in the way of you wanting to preload all media though too.

6. There is indeed a hard limit to 10 on the leaderboard. I've reported this too asking for a larger limit. I would guess that an unlimited leaderboard would be really server intensive, but probably going up to 20 wouldn't hurt.

7. 200MB per player and 250 players at a time sounds like it might be heavy hit. I'd recommend talking to Dave about server loads and the possibility of paying to boost the hosting for your big event to make sure it's got enough power to meet those needs.

8. I'm hoping this is just a problem with how the url gets handled when you make a web object in ARIS and something that could be cleared up by someone a bit more knowledgeable.

Again, thanks for assembling this detailed report for us.

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[Charles Leffingwell]

Response Re: item 1

We have noticed previously (not sure about now) that when creating a user account, if the username is already taken, the app seems to crash.  In actuality it just did nothing and did not relay an error message.  When a unique (to ARIS) username was chosen, it would work fine.

Re Item 4 (video orientation) 

We successfully use portrait videos all of the time.  I think your issue may have to do with the video editor forcing a landscape format by default. (many video editors do this unless you specifically tell it not to)  Optimizing your video to the ARIS display aspect and resolution will also help you get a better viewing experience for the user and save space)

Here is a screen shot of the properties on our 

mp4  

We have also implemented closed captioning.  Our aspect ratio may be different than the iPhone aspect.  We primarily use iPad airs for our intended audience. 450 width and 640 height has worked well for us.

[michae...@gmail.com]

Thanks, Charles, I'll have another fresh look at my video options and post back here if I discover anything. I'm using Magix Movie Editor 2014, which isn't perfect but tends to be fairly functional and was relatively cheap. It does let you set the aspect ratio you want for your film. The vertical footage shot from my iPod Touch was always imported 90 degrees and horizontal, however, regardless of how I set the movie project aspect ratio (which I suspect is some kind of Apple issue vs. non-Apple programs, though do not know for sure), and so there may be another wonky work-around but I'll have to figure it out. I can and should try again to play around more in the editor; however I don't think my video settings will impact the issues within ARIS about locking the video to a horizontal rectangle while attached as an item rather than a plaque and when in autoplay. Can you share a version of your game remotely so that I can see how your video looks? 

Thanks, Chris, re: your general follow-up. The server issue is one that has been plaguing me of late, as we haven't tested enough to know how crash-y this thing is yet and whether the observed snafus are my fault or an ARIS issue. I will reach out to Dave separately to inquire as you suggest. The other issue along these lines is that we are inviting users to post their own content, currently, via Notebook. So that adds data volume as this gets used more and more. Another potential concern, at least for our case.

Regarding the other video options (linking to a web object) yes, that might be a partial solution. I'm not an expert in javascript, so I am not sure how I could load videos that way. But as you suggest, the drawback in linking them to video elsewhere is that a user on their data plan may encounter choppy or hesitant video when downloading it close to real-time as opposed to having it preloaded. We will have to see.

Re: 8 - Update: today on a brief partial field-test, I noticed that the my ARIS link to the Siftr page went through to the right page, but I was still prompted to login with an ARIS or Siftr account to actually add to the Siftr; so somewhere along the line the ARIS logged-in information is not getting through to Siftr to tell it that I am already logged in. I suspect someone has been doing some work on this based on the fact that it at least went through to the Siftr.

Re: 1 - I haven't been able to wrangle the person who had the login problem to have her try again. Everyone else has been okay.

[Charles Leffingwell]

In the ARIS App Search for games and type in 'Serious Game'.  All the green icon results are ours and are packed with full page portrait videos.  

I ran into the same exact issues that you are running into about 2 years ago when I first started cropping and editing my own videos for our games. My college sprung for the adobe movie editor which I played with for a while. It was all solved by configuring the video editor properly on the export side.  Since then we are having our videos edited by a local videographer who is reasonable priced so I can't really remember the specifics of how to set up the video, but the adobe product had export choices specifically for various apple devices that made it easy to export the file with the proper codec and aspect ratio. There was a specific export for iPad Portrait.  There were similar choices for non-apple products that included options for landscape and portrait, so I don't think it is an apple issue. It was the export settings that made the difference. Before that in a free-er program, I remember having to specifically tell the video software to not force my vertical video into a horizontal format (it was adding blank space on either side of the video and forcing it to be plopped into a landscape orientation.)  My biggest issue back then was compressing the videos an decreasing the resolution to keep the file size under the 10MB ARIS media constraint, and still having it look good.  The videographer was able to do it without breaking a sweat.