obso1337.org

My Nintendo Wii number is 5087 5807-6001-6460-9728. My Mii is named Seele and J’s Mii is named Neomantra.

Let me know what your Wii number and Mii name is!

seele :: Mar.02.2007 :: Games, General :: 24 Comments »

Some of you may know that I am a big DDR fan, and have several “mixes” for the PS2. For the holiday, I received a new dance mat (I’ve worn out three so far) and the two latest DDR mixes (Supernova and Extreme 2).

However, I haven’t been able to play yet. There seems to be a problem with either the game, my PS2 controller interface, or the game pads I have tried. When trying to play DDR Supernova or Extreme 2, one of the arrows stick in the main menu and traverses all the options (which results in an annoying sound). When using the pads on any of my older games, they all work perfectly. I have tried three different pads — Red Octane’s Ignition Pat, Pelican’s Dance Pro Universal Pad, and Psyclone’s Universal Dance Mat — all with the same results. Pelican’s pad actually says on the box that it supports DDR Supernova as well.

I emailed Konomi’s customer support to inquire about any known problems, but they refused to comment since I wasn’t using Konomi brand dance pads. I sent mail to Pysclone’s customer service this afternoon, but couldn’t find contact information for Game Stop (who owns Pelican) except for a snail mail address, and haven’t contacted Red Octane yet.

A few days ago I took Supernova over to Elwing’s place and tried it with her PS2 and Colbalt Flux metal pad where it worked perfectly. The only troubleshooting option I haven’t tried yet is taking Supernova or Extreme 2 with one of the pads which don’t work on my PS2 and trying it on someone else’s PS2. If it works on their system, then there is something b0rk with my controller interface. I haven’t had any problems with other games or controllers.

Has anyone experienced problems like these or know of anyone who has? Any suggestions on a dance mat to try?

seele :: Jan.13.2007 :: Games, General :: 5 Comments »

Yes!

SecondLife has open sourced their client. Some gifts are better late than never.

seele :: Jan.08.2007 :: Asides, Open Source, Second Life :: Comments Off

I am a SuDoKu crazy. I do the puzzles on the train, in the car, and at work when I have a few moments. I like the deduction and logic exercise it provides when trying to solve a difficult puzzle. The Washington Post Express paper has puzzles from easy to difficult in their Metro paper and I like Web Sudoku to play at work in a browser. I have been steady on the medium puzzles (completion in about 10 minutes) and just got in to the difficult puzzles (which take much longer).

I wouldn’t call myself a sudoku expert. I am good at the puzzles (better than most everyone I know) but there are certainly solvable puzzles I get stumped on that others can solve. Right now I am looking for good advanced player techniques to help improve my game. Send me a tell if you know of any (I’m having a hard time filtering the basic sudoku results).

For Christmas I got a gift card to Barnes and Nobel, so this weekend Justin and I stopped by to look at the books. I wasn’t sure which one to get, but eventually settled on Brown Belt Sudoku graded as “hard”. After the first few puzzles, I felt they should have been graded much more easy. They wern’t ‘easy’ (some of the puzzles required advanced strategy to fill missing numbers), but most could be easily solved within 10 to 15 minutes using basic tactics.

Although a little disappointed, I will not despair. The book only cost around $8 and the puzzles are good for a few quick games in the car or on the train, so it wasn’t a total loss. I still have $12 left on my gift card, so some time this week I’ll probably stop by Barnes and Nobel again to try out Black Belt Sudoku graded as “super tough”.

We’ll see how tough they really are.

seele :: Jan.17.2006 :: Books, Games, General :: No Comments »

WoW custom UIs are notoriously complex. To the uninitiated, the mass of buttons and text can be alien and confusing. There is no reason to how or why things work the way they do, their total customization makes them usable to only the primary user (after a significan learning curve). After an impromptu lesson about Fitt’s and WoW GUI design with Justin the other night, I figured I should write it down.

Fitt’s Law Applied to WoW UIs

Something I see often is a giant mass of buttons arranged on the screen to both make way for other addon widgets and to maximize the number of macros the user can access at once. If you study them, you can see that many of these UIs are inefficient, no matter how adept the user is with the interface. The buttons are small, and important functions are hidden in a mass of similar-looking buttons.

What is the most efficient size for a block of buttons? Lets think about it in relation to Fitt’s Law.

Basically it is a prediction model for human movement which has determined:

• the bigger the target the easier it is to hit
• the edges and center of a target are easier to hit than a specific target in the middle

For right-handed users, the five easiest points to hit (red area) are:

center
1. bottom-left
2. top-left
3. top-right
4. bottom-right

Also, edges are easier (green area) to hit than targets off-center of an object (white area) and the easiest movements to make (black arrows) are from top to bottom (pulling motion) and left to right (pulling motion). Pulling towards yourself is a much more natural and comfortable motion than pushing away.

If you notice, the most efficient movement is similar to the MacOSX and Windows menu bar. Items are clicked from the top corner, dragged down and across to the right. Windows actually does a strange thing with the Start Menu, although the bottom right is one of the first points you will notice (although eyetracking research done for the web is slowly proving otherwise), clicking and accessing items in the Start Menu arn’t as comfortable as clicking and accessing the File menu in your application.

Now, lets get to the WoW UI part.

WoW UIs come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them provide additional information or easy interfaces to create custom macros, and others break apart the GUI itself and allows you to arrange buttons and dialogs however you see fit. I’ve seen several UIs which sport a giant pile of buttons, all arranged in a tight condensed area in order to allow room for other dialogs and information.

But is something like that really improving your game? Lets talk about grouping buttons.

Here we have a diagram of several button layouts. The most efficient and easy to search-and-click layout would be the single button. There are no other buttons around it competing for space, it is a single target to hit, and no scanning is necessary once the target area is identified.

Next we have a 2×2 square. This ‘four corners’ example allows easy targeting of all four buttons (bottom-left, top-left, top-right, bottom-right corners) as well as movement in five directions. The top-left button is the most versatile and allows the most movement. This button would be the best button to start a button combo or to put a life-saving ‘Oh Shit!’ macro.

But wait, we can do better. You wouldnt benefit much by a 2×2 square over the existing interface because the default buttons are set up as horizontal and vertical rows in order to take advantage of the edges. Let’s look at a 3×3 example.

In this example we still have the four corner sweet spots as well as the center. There is still the optimized movement between the corners, however the diagonal movement from top-left towards the center is slightly weakened. The middle edges between the corners are not as strong as the corners themselves, however are still viable because of their ‘edge’ quality.

This layout provides more room for more complex combinations allowing quick horizontal or vertical moves without having to change direction to access additional buttons. Keep in mind the longer the movement and further you get from the starting point of a combination, the weaker the movement will become.

Now we will go a step further and look at a 4×4 square. Immediatly a high level of complexity is introduced. We lose the center sweet spot to four buttons instead of one (this is a result of the ‘even’ number of blocks, but still a factor). There is yet more horizonal and vertical room for combinations, however their length weakens the movement.

The size of the block introduces ‘dead zones’, buttons which would take much more effort and mobility to scan, identify, and navigate to (represented in yellow). These would not be recommended in combinations with critical attacks or mid-battle life saving techniques. Because of this, these dead buttons essentially become useless in battle and take up space, reducing the benefit of the larger horizontal and vertical combinations which are already weakened by their length.

Where in the 3×3 layout essentially all 9 blocks (100%) were strong (blocks in which they were a sweet spot (in red) or strong movement (in black)), the 4×4 only has 8 blocks (50%) which are strong. Not a very efficient use of space with the potential of causing error and death (in game of course).

Overall the most efficient use of space, movement, and value is the 3×3 square. You get the highest rated single-target points as well as space to create more complex combinations of clicks while not having to relive Simon every time you want to play the game. If designed with contexts of attacks, casting, defense, or healing in mind, it could become a very efficient and usable alternative interface for WoW.

Happy Hunting!

seele :: Jan.05.2006 :: General, WoW :: 4 Comments »