How to I create a load page?
Such as a progress bar or some sort of control that will display on how long will it take to load?
Progress bars are generally not a good idea unless you can with a high degree of certainty know exactly how long something is going to take.
Instead creating some sort of loading image is generally a better idea and I'm sure you've seen the switch in the industry to this style. (A spinning circle on the tab in Google Chrome for example when the page is loading, or the rotating circles in the bottom right of the screen for most Xbox 360 games).
As for how to do it, there isn't a lot of complexity to it. Your game runs in a loop and most long running things like loading happen in the background so all you have to do is keep checking in every Update call if that thing you're waiting on is still happening. If it is continue showing the "loading" graphic. Ideally you'd be handling that with some sort of game state indicator so that all your game has to do is switch to a "loading" or "waiting" state and the game would automatically drawing the standard waiting/loading screen for your game.
For more understanding of Game State I've got a fairly lengthy tutorial that you can read on the subject called "The State of Things"
Related
I was wandering if there is any way (maybe a console command) to keep the "external" size of the in game HUD unchanged when a hero acquires new abilities. e.g. when Tusk gets his Aghanim's scepter and gains Walrus Kick the abilities become 5 and the HUD resizes to accommodate 5 abilities instead of 4. Can I stop that? I have seen it happening in the HUD used for the TI broadcasted maps where the abilities' icons shrink, instead of the UI expanding.
I have gone through the list of console commands but the number is so vast and the documentation so poor that I couldn't find anything!
Thanks!
I am developing an aframe project on my MacBook pro, late 2013. When running the project, the fan of my computer always spins fast, regardless which browser I use (firefox, safari, chrome) and the project size (also happens with a project just containing a simple a-box).
aframe-stats show me that my project (1028244 vertices, 342748 faces) still runs with 20 fps.
Is it somehow possible to limit the frame rate to 10fps in order to keep my computer quite? Or any other way to limit the flop-consumption of the aframe project? I already tried a native approach with sudo cputhrottle plugin-container 10 but that did not just throttle the aframe-renderer but the whole firefox browser. Can I pull the break somewhere in the JavaScript or the Browser settings?
It's difficult to say without your project code. Large data sets will simply crank out even a high spec macbook pro. I have found it helpful to pause any rendering whenever possible to quiet the users' machines.
I personally removed automated next animation frame rendering in favor of waiting for controls and objects to change.
For example:
this.controls.addEventListener( 'change', function(e){ addToRenderStack(); });
A simple function addtorenderstack puts in a new value in a list for a render, with the expectation that the render will occur at some point in the future and not right away. the list can also be used to log who requested the render in the call stack, and narrow down performance hogs.
addtorenderstack places a render request in a list. In the requestanimationframe loop, if the list has any length, a render is called on the scene. The stack is immediately cleared rather than processed one by one. If controls or animations continue to make render requests, the list will have a length again and request animationframe will process them in the same way with another render.
In this way, the code only renders when absolutely required. This saved me much grinding on framerate and the fans only come on during intensive operations and then shutdown when its complete, much like a typical 3d game experience.
Your mileage may vary depending on what's happening in your app. I work in engineering so often the view of the 3d world is stopped as an engineer examines or shows a model.
I have a scenario that I need some good solid advice on. The question is really about speed of WriteableBitmap vs. images in IsolatedStorage on the Windows Phone.
I have an app that displays a UserControl (#1) which is a little graphically heavy. When the user swipes it, it transitions in a push-left type of transition to bring in a new UserControl (#2) which is also a little graphically heavy. If the user swipes the other way, control #1 is brought in in the same type of push-transition, this time from the right.
What I do today is take a snapshot of #1, load #2 off screen and take a snapshot of it, put both side-by-side in a Canvas control and animate that control either left or right. One of the reasons I don't just use the controls and animate them is they may have animation that starts when they are loaded - my current technique allows me to capture a screen shot of pre-animation and post-animation, depending on which direction they go in.
What I'm wondering, however, if it would be better/faster to just do the above the first time and send the writeablebitmap to IsolatedStorage with Extenstions.SaveJPEG and just use that instead in subsequent tranistion animations.
Would load/render/WriteableBitmap each time generally be faster or load jpeg from IsolatedStorage be faster each time? I see that the Transitions control in the SDK doesn't really do either of these, so I'm open to suggestions that are different that also might improve performance.
I expect this to be very depended on the hardware and application. So it is pretty hard to give an answer based on this input. It doesn't look to hard to test (on actual hardware and with the actual application) so my advice is to build both and test.
The applications I have been working with use both approaches and to be honest I haven't noticed much difference.
Also you might try and enable bitmap caching on the controls. This will give you a writeable bitmap implementation that is very fast.
I need help explaining to my boss why her design is poor on a client's website. She has no knowledge of the web, and it can be difficult as a web developer working with a woman who is a graphic designer (not even a web designer really). On a current site she has designed, an image bar "needs" to be ~1200px according to her, though it isn't necessary with the content. A quick sketch to illustrate what's going on:
As you see, the banner spills out past the 960px of the content and as wide as 1200px. This creates a horizontal scroll when all the content is viewable within the 960px wide viewport. I need to make this an <img> and not a CSS background because it's a jQuery slideshow that fades from image to image.
I think this is a big problem because a lot of people are going to get a horizontal scroll bar imposed in their browser when they're still able to see all the relevant content. She thinks no one will notice and it'll be fine; I think it's very bad practice and confusing to the end user.
How do I explain the problem to her?
Ask her if she would want to open a brochure to only see that one of the folds was unnecessary as it merely has some header image spilling over into it (but no content).
XXXXXXX|XXXXXXX
XIMAGEX|XIMAGEX
XXXXXXX|XXXXXXX
|
Some | (but
content| this
here | is
| blank)
Point her to Nielsen - on of the most famous and top level web usability experts.
"Horizontal Scrolling" is error #3 in "Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002" article
Also, point out (not sure if Nielsen does) that vast majority of mice don't have horizontal scroll wheels (that was a point made in comments of an article discussing Nielsen's article).
Also, do the usual UI thing - TEST!
Pick 5 random people who ideally match the desired user profile. Ask them to use the mock-up with and without warning and observe which one's easier/faster (and ask, but also obseve without asking)
Hmm. It sounds like you guys need a requirements analyst to step in the middle here. Deciding on a broswer specification & resolution that you'll conform to is a fair thing to ask, I think. Just assuming that 'most' users will have wide screen is not enough for most apps. Seems like she'd be hard pressed to explain why she can't redesign her banner to be smaller & fit the desired size.
I think that user will absolutely notice the horizontal scroll bar and be annoyed by it. Because it's not something most users are used to seeing (can't think of any major sites that have one), they'd have (in effect) learn something new to use your site, which is not good. They should be able to look at a site and be able to use it right away, not spend a few seconds figuring out that the scroll bar doesn't show you any new content, just the additional graphics from the header - those few seconds are where you lose people.
I wonder also, if there's any section 508 guidance on horizontal scroll bars. That may not matter to you guys, but I'm developing gov't sites, so 508 is a big deal for us day to day. If you've got a user using just a keyboard or a screen reader, that scroll bar is more than just annoying.
Two points I would make:
NO major website uses horizontal scroll. Not one. This means, regardless of what she considers "good" design, 100% of users will be confused and will probably never see the content off the right side of the screen.
Horizontal scroll is the print equivalent of a fold-out or "centerfold" style-page. Would you make every page in a magazine like this?
People read left to right, top to bottom (or right to left in some countries). Because of this they can read a lot more content before they need to start scrolling as they only have to scroll vertically.
If you introduce horizontal scrolling then the user has to potentially scroll at the end of each line rather than at the end of each page.
Almost everybody has a wheel mouse now, but only a very few people have wheel mice that side scroll. And even fewer people even know wheels can side scroll!
Let her chew on that.
Try these two points to convince her :
Show her some data about most used browsers resolutions (still 20% internet users have 1024x768 screen resolution)
Having some part of the website not visible when the page is loaded is not "user-friendly" (user can miss some critical information)
Can the entire banner and all the component images within it be scaled down to be narrower? (admittedly it woudl also be shorter, may be more difficult to read etc). Then if the face on the right is really important it woudl still be visible... Horizontal scroll is just really really bad. But I guess you (and everyone else) already knew that :)
You should give her examples and show her what she is trying to do. Do you really want to scroll horizontally to get to information on the other side of the page.
http://www.badwebsiteideas.com/horizontal.htm
Many animation effects are simply gratuitous eye candy -- however, there are situations where animations effectively communicate to the user what's going on.
What are some of your favorite uses for animations, and what specific animation type would you use?
E.g.: Animate items downwards when a new item is inserted into a list
I really like Google Chrome's use when a file is being downloaded. It's hard to describe, but, it's a circle that fills like a pie chart as the download progresses, and the circle is overlaid with the icon for the file you're downloading. Very slick.
One example I can think of is the animation used by operating systems when you minimize a window.
Both Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X animate the window going down to the taskbar (or the Dock in OS X) to show the user where the window went. Otherwise novice users that hit minimize by accident might have trouble getting the window back.
I don't use linux, but I'm pretty sure it does the same. I'm not being discriminative =)
From enjoy3d.com
enjoy3d.com http://worldsware.com/images/mouse.gif
Press your mouse button
and move to look around.
There is a very nice paper by Ben Bederson and Angela Boltman in which they evaluate the impact of animation on user’s ability to build a mental map of the information in the space:
Does Animation Help Users Build Mental Maps
of Spatial Information?
I believe that all visual changes should not be swift. Be it status notification, window maximized/minimized, or data deleted/added. I cannot find a reference, but usually it is recommended that all animations should not be around 1-2 seconds, matching human's response time.
My favorite uses of animation is not in a commercial software (though Apple is good at this) but a research paper called Phosphor which I consider one of the great UI ideas that have not yet implemented into major operating systems.
AJAX loading gifs - you've got to have an indicator that you definitely registered an event and you're doing something about it
Progress bars are nice for things that take more than a moment or two, but only when they are accurate. An inaccurate progress bar is worse than none, in my opinion.