4 ms·

"Zoom to mouse position" seems to only improvement I can find. -- Why would anybody zoom elsewhere than to the mouse position?

egypturnash 4y ago
Mouse is off in the corner of the screen. You press the zoom hotkey, expecting it to zoom in on the center. Instead it zooms in on wherever the fuck you left the pointer. You swear, and curse the person who changed the way things have been working for years. Maybe you get used to it. Maybe they listen to the mass screams of everyone who’s been using it for years and add a switch to work the old way. Maybe you never get used to it and it’s a constant frustration that drives you to another program, or even out of this medium entirely.
- moron4hire 4y ago
  Maybe you realize the mistake was that keyboard input and mouse input should not go through the same code paths. I have done a lot of interactive application design over the years. Not "games", but the underlying tech is very similar. Combining mouse and keyboard input is almost always a mistake for anything but the most basic, narrowly-scoped, get-this-done-now kinds of indie first-person-shooter games. If you ever want to develop a system that is maximally accessible to different input modalities, you have to treat the mouse and keyboard as completely different devices that aren't related. Because, for a large number of people, they really aren't.
  - justinclift 4y ago
    The same trap seems to happen sometimes for game devs. eg When they target game controllers originally then attempt to retro-fit keyboard control (for PC players) later. It leads to bizarre, and almost unplayable, keyboard mapping schemes for what should otherwise be good games. The most recent example that comes to mind is Moonlighter: https://steamcommunity.com/app/606150/discussions/0/3043859512561797915/ https://steamcommunity.com/app/606150/discussions/0/30438595... Unfortunately with that example, the dev's doubled down and didn't address the problem, rendering it pretty much a useless port. :(
    - moron4hire 4y ago
      That is absolutely bizarre. It's not just indie games, though. The Final Fantasy 7 remake has a gamepad-first/keyboard-shoehorned-in input scheme. It makes the game nearly unplayable.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  Right, this is like with window focus features. What people want is whatever they expected to happen and so the "correct" implementation is you read their mind and do that. In the absence of mind reading technologies we cannot help but fall short of what is desired. Say you offer a config option. Now the program has the "wrong" (unintended) behaviour in some cases and you insist the config option should be changed, but now it has "wrong" behaviour in other cases. It's infuriating, why doesn't it just work? OK, let's fix it to work one way. Now if we obviously intended the other thing, it never works and there's no way to change that, still infuriating. OK, let's offer both with separate keypresses. Now the user feels like you're saddling them with the problem instead of "just" solving it. This stupid program has two zoom buttons, and whichever one you use it's always the wrong one.
  - egypturnash 4y ago
    If you have a configuration option, then it may ship with the "wrong" behavior, but once the user finds this option and switches it, they never need to think about it again. (Unless they are in an environment where they regularly need to interact with other people's machines. Which can be solved; when I worked in an animation studio we had a standard set of key shortcuts for things that Flash didn't assign keys to out of the box so that a director could hop onto anyone's computer to edit a scene and be confident that, for instance, slamming numpad-0 would get them the very frequently used Free Transform tool.) (The user may also have to think about it again when a new release comes up with an exciting new way to be "wrong"; if a prefs switch was not provided along with this new behavior then the result will be a new top-voted bug on the public bug/feature tracker, and people reverting to the previous version until the .1 release that grudgingly adds a switch. Or swearing a lot and deciding it's time to have a look at the competition if rolling back to the previous release isn't an option.)
    - tialaramex 4y ago
      > it may ship with the "wrong" behavior, but once the user finds this option and switches it, they never need to think about it again. The other behaviour is also wrong. That's the whole point.
- ninju 4y ago
  > You swear, and curse the person who changed the way things have been working for years. Maybe you get used to it. Maybe they listen to the mass screams of everyone who’s been using it for years and add a switch to work the old way.... https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ :-)
timonoko 4y ago
This solves the missing mouse panning button. You can zoom-in, move mouse somewhere else, zoom-out and voilà, panning happened.

egypturnash 4y ago

Mouse is off in the corner of the screen. You press the zoom hotkey, expecting it to zoom in on the center. Instead it zooms in on wherever the fuck you left the pointer. You swear, and curse the person who changed the way things have been working for years. Maybe you get used to it. Maybe they listen to the mass screams of everyone who’s been using it for years and add a switch to work the old way. Maybe you never get used to it and it’s a constant frustration that drives you to another program, or even out of this medium entirely.

moron4hire 4y ago
Maybe you realize the mistake was that keyboard input and mouse input should not go through the same code paths. I have done a lot of interactive application design over the years. Not "games", but the underlying tech is very similar. Combining mouse and keyboard input is almost always a mistake for anything but the most basic, narrowly-scoped, get-this-done-now kinds of indie first-person-shooter games. If you ever want to develop a system that is maximally accessible to different input modalities, you have to treat the mouse and keyboard as completely different devices that aren't related. Because, for a large number of people, they really aren't.
- justinclift 4y ago
  The same trap seems to happen sometimes for game devs. eg When they target game controllers originally then attempt to retro-fit keyboard control (for PC players) later. It leads to bizarre, and almost unplayable, keyboard mapping schemes for what should otherwise be good games. The most recent example that comes to mind is Moonlighter: https://steamcommunity.com/app/606150/discussions/0/3043859512561797915/ https://steamcommunity.com/app/606150/discussions/0/30438595... Unfortunately with that example, the dev's doubled down and didn't address the problem, rendering it pretty much a useless port. :(
  - moron4hire 4y ago
    That is absolutely bizarre. It's not just indie games, though. The Final Fantasy 7 remake has a gamepad-first/keyboard-shoehorned-in input scheme. It makes the game nearly unplayable.
tialaramex 4y ago
Right, this is like with window focus features. What people want is whatever they expected to happen and so the "correct" implementation is you read their mind and do that. In the absence of mind reading technologies we cannot help but fall short of what is desired. Say you offer a config option. Now the program has the "wrong" (unintended) behaviour in some cases and you insist the config option should be changed, but now it has "wrong" behaviour in other cases. It's infuriating, why doesn't it just work? OK, let's fix it to work one way. Now if we obviously intended the other thing, it never works and there's no way to change that, still infuriating. OK, let's offer both with separate keypresses. Now the user feels like you're saddling them with the problem instead of "just" solving it. This stupid program has two zoom buttons, and whichever one you use it's always the wrong one.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  If you have a configuration option, then it may ship with the "wrong" behavior, but once the user finds this option and switches it, they never need to think about it again. (Unless they are in an environment where they regularly need to interact with other people's machines. Which can be solved; when I worked in an animation studio we had a standard set of key shortcuts for things that Flash didn't assign keys to out of the box so that a director could hop onto anyone's computer to edit a scene and be confident that, for instance, slamming numpad-0 would get them the very frequently used Free Transform tool.) (The user may also have to think about it again when a new release comes up with an exciting new way to be "wrong"; if a prefs switch was not provided along with this new behavior then the result will be a new top-voted bug on the public bug/feature tracker, and people reverting to the previous version until the .1 release that grudgingly adds a switch. Or swearing a lot and deciding it's time to have a look at the competition if rolling back to the previous release isn't an option.)
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    > it may ship with the "wrong" behavior, but once the user finds this option and switches it, they never need to think about it again. The other behaviour is also wrong. That's the whole point.
ninju 4y ago
> You swear, and curse the person who changed the way things have been working for years. Maybe you get used to it. Maybe they listen to the mass screams of everyone who’s been using it for years and add a switch to work the old way.... https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ :-)

timonoko 4y ago

This solves the missing mouse panning button. You can zoom-in, move mouse somewhere else, zoom-out and voilà, panning happened.