Eldorado.Railroad, on 18 April 2012 - 10:53 AM, said:
Yep, this same question has been coming up over and over again. If the aim is to get new users involved and engaged you will have to ask yourself "why is the same darn question coming up over and over and over again". This wastes your precious development time and has your users shaking their heads. Not everyone has a CS degree and 30 years experience to figure out what was intended. Probably far fewer have a BS in Physics to understand what should happen. I am sure that many view OR as the cheaper alternative to running an HO scale train on a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood. Ask yourself, "how simple are the controls for either DC or DCC to get a train moving"? Getting the train "moving" for the first time is what the new user wants, hard to argue with that.
I will recommend that in the future, some usability testing be done so that the average iPad user can have some way of figuring things out, even if for the diehards you are not being prototypical. The lack of usability testing is what has sunk numerous payware software packages in the past. It always catches the developers by surprise that what was so logical and perfect falls flat on its face with an average user. It takes a developer with backbone to admit "we got it wrong" lets fix it, fast!
I am sure that there are plenty of users here that will give you a ton of suggestions on what they would like to see, even if from the coders point of view the response will be "I don't want to change that!". I have sat in your chair and have had to do exactly that, "change the damn code". You need not look too far back (sorry if 20 years is a long time!) to notice that most flight sims had various levels of "realism". I think OR should take a page out of that book and allow for the iPad way of operation, as well as what we have now. This could be set in the registry as you are doing now for most startup parameters. Even though the "power user" may not like it, the initial install should allow for simple operation as far as registry settings are concerned. There should be menu items in the OR launcher to make the locomotive operations more difficult should the user desire that.
This has two benefits, first, new users will not be scared away, second, experienced users have more control than what they have now. From personal experience, even though I have the keyboard sequences memorized for brakes I still wish there was a way of making it simple for model testing. If you want the artistically inclined to get involved with model making for OR, his/her needs should be addressed. Model making not only involves polygons, but textures, eng files, sound etc. This can become very tedious if the launching of a locomotive involves running through the hoops the way it is forced on the user now, just for testing.
As is, the HUD is becoming very crowded and I don't think you will be able to grab the novices attention with a "the brakes are on, that is why I ain't moving!" message. I have great issues with the HUD not being legible against most skies and have to resort to changing the camera angle into the contrasting ground to see what the heck is going on. Given the free form nature of all the information that is there, putting a dark contraster behind it is they way to go. If this contraster can be switched off and on as the user requires then it should not obstruct the view needlessly. Some flight sims allowed for the color of the text in the HUD (on the fly), which helped with contrast problems.
Finally, even if you believe so, I can assure you that many an iPad user are NOT given to reading documentation for the initial run of OR, regardless of how well you may have written it. Once the user is involved and interested, and it is not to hard to do so, they will read the documentation if they can see some tangible benefit, since this is a game/sim, that implies "fun".
I wish you would use the numpad #5 key to reset camera views to the startup values as I suggested many months ago. This is a usability problem that comes up over and over again for model testing in OR.
regards,
Eldorado
Fabulous ! I can subscribe ALL of the above.
It does not chip away anything from OR's achievable realism if you give the user the option to configure in the setup / options menu what he wants to see in the sim: Precipitation, realistic brakes preparation, release, application etc., derailments, coupler breaks, engine failures, head-on crashes, automatic fireman, whatever. Offer the user a menu which lets him chose what exactly he wants. MSTS already had this feature, why not OR ? Software should become better over time and offer more choices and possibilities, not less !
The changeable HUD color (and I would add font type and size in there !) is also a very good idea, which will help tremendously with reading it in different circumstances (night, day, different screen resolutions etc.).