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Old 02-16-2021, 04:03 AM   #23
GerReader
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GerReader has read War And Peace ... all of itGerReader has read War And Peace ... all of itGerReader has read War And Peace ... all of itGerReader has read War And Peace ... all of itGerReader has read War And Peace ... all of itGerReader has read War And Peace ... all of itGerReader has read War And Peace ... all of itGerReader has read War And Peace ... all of itGerReader has read War And Peace ... all of itGerReader has read War And Peace ... all of itGerReader has read War And Peace ... all of it
 
Posts: 52
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Join Date: Oct 2020
Location: Germany, Rhein-Main
Device: PocketBook Touch HD 3
Thanks for the feedback, the Tracks puzzle is really the puzzle in the collection where I am still struggling with finding a good solution for UI handling.

The problem with this puzzle is that it is clearly designed for playing on a desktop computer with a mouse, and that it needs a lot of different things that need to be controlled, compared to the other puzzles in the collection. You have cell highlighting/crossing out, and also track laying and border crossing out. Four different actions, no problem with a mouse, more tricky with only one finger. Exactly placement of a tap is less accurate on touch-screen, and to distinguish left / right click with short / long tap is also introducing a certain sneaky problem. When you click on a screen, first of all a short-click is always delivered to the event handler, and to be sure that it is a long-click the UI interpreter has to wait. There are all subtle differences to mouse handling that one has to take into account.

I was already not quite happy with the Tracks UI in the android version, and the redesign in my port was an attempt to address especially the problem that I regularly had misplacements where I clicked, so for example a track was laid where I only wanted to highlight the cell.

My idea in the redesign was to avoid above misinterpretation by laying a track only when both adjacent cells are already highlighted, similiar the border crossing out. To speed up game playing, laying a track is still possible into a non-highlighted cell when the track line is ending in the cell from which one wants to continue.

But yeah, that these changes make un-highlighting a cell now unreliable is something that also catched my attention.

I am now considering adding a new configuration screen for certain puzzles where you can configure game-specific UI entry methods. For Tracks this could be the option to switch between the old and the new entry method. For other games to choose what a short and what a long-click is doing.
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