Testing results

[Chris McCormick]

Hi all,

Thanks very much to everyone who participated in yesterday's testing session.
It was extremely useful for me as I found a whole bunch of bugs etc. and
realised some features that will be neccessary to make the social side of
things work better (I'm thinking about the chat system here).

If anyone has any bugs or thoughts or criticisms please feel free to send them
through to me.

Cheers, and thanks again,

Chris.

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http://mccormick.cx

[Crispin Wellington]

Hey, that was a lot of fun. I can definitely see the promise that the
game holds in a social context.

The bugs/comments I would like to make are:

1. avatars need to be distinguishable. Even something at this stage as
simple as pick a single colour to make your avatar would work fine. At
later stages people will want custom graphics/animations.

2. usernames. They shouldn't be permanently displayed, but maybe
something like mouse over an avatar and see who it is.

3. chat history. There needs to be a classic style chat window
overlaid in the bottom corner with the ongoing conversations for the
level logged.

4. Airbrush tool network reproducibility. After drawing the trees I
noticed when I came back the redraw was not the same as the original
draw. What was a fully filled in area with the airbrush became
partially filled in, as if only some of the pixels that were painted
were remembered for the redraw.

5. memory exhaustion and lock up on /teleport biscuit (or whatever
that level was called). Now when I teleport to that grey level we were
all in, the changes begin to come across the network and the redraw
begins, but then the programme locks up and consumes all memory. It
needs to be forcibly kill -9 ed.

That's all I got.

Thanks everyone.

Crispin

[Chris McCormick]

Hey,

Great, thanks for your input, this is very useful.

Some of the issues you saw (memory exhaustion, airbrush) were due to some last
minute tweaks I did to the protocol just to get it working for the test. I
actually had it in a better state for Saturday's test but I wanted to try and
fix a bug I found there and, well, you know how it goes fixing bugs at the last
minute. :)

The chat/avatar stuff I guess became pretty obvious to everyone quite quickly!
I plan to implement some things along the lines of what you're talking about
here. There are also some bugs in the chat code I need to fix, and key-repeat
functionality would be very nice indeed.

Cheers,

Chris.

PS customiseable avatars is on the roadmap for the next release.

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http://mccormick.cx

[Jon Hayward]

I would reccomend against custom avatar characters beyond basic coloring. I would
reccomend looking towards a system similar to forum / FB avatars, with people
uploading a image that can be viewed with the username. It'll be simpler and yet
still be effective.

On Tue Mar 15 10:49 , Crispin Wellington <retrogr...@gmail.com> sent:

>)

[Nick Lowe]

Maybe... Gravatars? (as one option)

http://en.gravatar.com/

- Nick

[Chris McCormick]

Hi Jon,

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 05:59:54PM +0800, Jon Hayward wrote:
> I would reccomend against custom avatar characters beyond basic coloring. I would
> reccomend looking towards a system similar to forum / FB avatars, with people
> uploading a image that can be viewed with the username. It'll be simpler and yet
> still be effective.

My strategy with infinite platformer has always been to implement the simplest
useful thing first. I like Nick's idea of using Gravatars, but I really don't
want to collect user emails in the client at this point. That will change later
when there is a server side web based registration process. I think I will
implement a simple nick-name thing to begin with, and perhaps custom colouring.
In the long run I definitely want people to be able to edit their avatar
animations in the same way that they can edit levels and items.

Thanks for the input, everyone!

Cheers,

Chris.

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http://mccormick.cx