4 ms·

So he let this bug sit in his game for two years without thinking of a work around himself? The situation where any platform owner has a bug that impacts your

So he let this bug sit in his game for two years without thinking of a work around himself? The situation where any platform owner has a bug that impacts your software you should try as best you can to work around it because you never know if and when it will get fixed.

Kiro 14y ago
What game? I think you missed the point of his blog post.
- mmuro 14y ago
  No he didn't. Read the post. This was the first sentence: "Almost two years ago I noticed a strange multitouch problem in Mobile Safari with one of my games." He should have learned to adapt instead of wait for a change that obviously wasn't going to happen.
  - jerf 14y ago
    So, tell me something: How do you adapt to not receiving an event? The only choice is to do something completely different, but I can't think of anything that doesn't profoundly change the nature of the game (continuously jump makes a completely different game, use upward motion to jump will have a lot of false positives) and is basically an admission that a game that involves two buttons like this is simply impossible. And that's an unreasonable outcome. (The continuously jumping game has interesting potential, but it is a different game. Plus I've think I've seen it way back in the day and it's very visually tiring.)
- uxp 14y ago
  Reading through your comment history makes you appear to be a rather unfriendly commenter. We like to maintain civil discussions here on HN, so please try to contribute accordingly. The entire article revolves around a bug that came about from an HTML5 game the author was working on. > Almost two years ago I noticed a strange multitouch problem in Mobile Safari with one of my games. TwistedWeasel has a valid point. OS X and iOS are not open source projects one can fork and submit patches to. Neither is Windows or Windows Mobile for that matter. If someone finds a bug, submitting a testcase and doing a lot of legwork is probably appreciated, but none of that will guarantee the bug will get fixed. Finding a workaround is a much better short term solution for the developer because they can continue on developing the way they need to and not have to wait for the black box of Apple's Radar to return a positive result. On some occasions, the developer might be able to search into WebKit to see if the problem is there, and submitting a bug report to that project might return more valid feedback. Significant portions of both OS X and iOS are available in source code form. Is this ideal? No. Is it how it works? Yes. Can an everyday non-Apple engineer do anything about it? Not really.
  - nixle 14y ago
    Hello? Sir? Please come down from there... hi, welcome back to reality. Have you read the article we are "discussing"? No? Ok, well, it has a LOT of "F" words, swearing and sentences like "A test case that a 3 year old could understand" in it. Please don't pretend it's literature that goes around these parts. Also, stop whoring for Karma.
    - Karunamon 14y ago
      Nobody cares about Karma on HN. Please take such concerns back to Reddit.
  - melvinmt 14y ago
    I'm sorry but what has his comment history to do with the comment he is writing right now? You should discuss content not occupy yourself with labeling people as 'unfriendly commenter' based on every comment written in history.
    - uxp 14y ago
      Off Topic: Twice in this thread he/she asked the same condescending question if the person he/she was replying to had actually read the article, with this one in particular showing indication he failed to read a portion of the article also. I didn't really care to start up an argument with someone on the internet if they were having a bad day (we all have bad days), so I quickly glanced over their comment history and saw a pattern. Its this kind of behavior some of us strive to avoid on HN. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I thought my remark was fairly civil. I was not trying to start an argument or flame war, and dedicated a significant portion of my reply to the topic of conversation and tried to be brief in reminding him/her about the reasons most of us visit HN over other news aggregating sites.
AshleysBrain 14y ago
This doesn't sound like the kind of issue that can be worked around. The OS sends you the wrong touch events. How do you work around that?
- TwistedWeasel 14y ago
  Change the game design slightly? He claims he wants to walk and jump at the same time, maybe adjust the control scheme to make jumping triggered in a different way. This bug, in particular is not a an easy thing to work around, I agree and maybe he did try all sorts of things but none of them worked, we don't know. My point is - in the general case you should not rely on Apple fixing a bug to make your product work correctly.
  - ahoge 14y ago
    >Change the game design slightly? There aren't many game concepts which work with just one button. Actually, having just one button is so absurd that people turned this particular limitation into a competition (similar to <=4kB and the like).
  - AshleysBrain 14y ago
    In case you didn't know, the post is by the author of the ImpactJS game engine. The job of engine writers is to make sure everything works - working around it for one specific game helps only that game, but does not ensure all games using the engine will work. So the next best thing the engine author can do is pressure the OS maker (Apple) in to fixing the bug, which is what this post is about, since there is no feasible way an engine or library can work around problems like this in general.
- nsfmc 14y ago
  swipe to jump?

Kiro 14y ago

What game? I think you missed the point of his blog post.

mmuro 14y ago
No he didn't. Read the post. This was the first sentence: "Almost two years ago I noticed a strange multitouch problem in Mobile Safari with one of my games." He should have learned to adapt instead of wait for a change that obviously wasn't going to happen.
- jerf 14y ago
  So, tell me something: How do you adapt to not receiving an event? The only choice is to do something completely different, but I can't think of anything that doesn't profoundly change the nature of the game (continuously jump makes a completely different game, use upward motion to jump will have a lot of false positives) and is basically an admission that a game that involves two buttons like this is simply impossible. And that's an unreasonable outcome. (The continuously jumping game has interesting potential, but it is a different game. Plus I've think I've seen it way back in the day and it's very visually tiring.)
uxp 14y ago
Reading through your comment history makes you appear to be a rather unfriendly commenter. We like to maintain civil discussions here on HN, so please try to contribute accordingly. The entire article revolves around a bug that came about from an HTML5 game the author was working on. > Almost two years ago I noticed a strange multitouch problem in Mobile Safari with one of my games. TwistedWeasel has a valid point. OS X and iOS are not open source projects one can fork and submit patches to. Neither is Windows or Windows Mobile for that matter. If someone finds a bug, submitting a testcase and doing a lot of legwork is probably appreciated, but none of that will guarantee the bug will get fixed. Finding a workaround is a much better short term solution for the developer because they can continue on developing the way they need to and not have to wait for the black box of Apple's Radar to return a positive result. On some occasions, the developer might be able to search into WebKit to see if the problem is there, and submitting a bug report to that project might return more valid feedback. Significant portions of both OS X and iOS are available in source code form. Is this ideal? No. Is it how it works? Yes. Can an everyday non-Apple engineer do anything about it? Not really.
- nixle 14y ago
  Hello? Sir? Please come down from there... hi, welcome back to reality. Have you read the article we are "discussing"? No? Ok, well, it has a LOT of "F" words, swearing and sentences like "A test case that a 3 year old could understand" in it. Please don't pretend it's literature that goes around these parts. Also, stop whoring for Karma.
  - Karunamon 14y ago
    Nobody cares about Karma on HN. Please take such concerns back to Reddit.
- melvinmt 14y ago
  I'm sorry but what has his comment history to do with the comment he is writing right now? You should discuss content not occupy yourself with labeling people as 'unfriendly commenter' based on every comment written in history.
  - uxp 14y ago
    Off Topic: Twice in this thread he/she asked the same condescending question if the person he/she was replying to had actually read the article, with this one in particular showing indication he failed to read a portion of the article also. I didn't really care to start up an argument with someone on the internet if they were having a bad day (we all have bad days), so I quickly glanced over their comment history and saw a pattern. Its this kind of behavior some of us strive to avoid on HN. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I thought my remark was fairly civil. I was not trying to start an argument or flame war, and dedicated a significant portion of my reply to the topic of conversation and tried to be brief in reminding him/her about the reasons most of us visit HN over other news aggregating sites.

AshleysBrain 14y ago

This doesn't sound like the kind of issue that can be worked around. The OS sends you the wrong touch events. How do you work around that?

TwistedWeasel 14y ago
Change the game design slightly? He claims he wants to walk and jump at the same time, maybe adjust the control scheme to make jumping triggered in a different way. This bug, in particular is not a an easy thing to work around, I agree and maybe he did try all sorts of things but none of them worked, we don't know. My point is - in the general case you should not rely on Apple fixing a bug to make your product work correctly.
- ahoge 14y ago
  >Change the game design slightly? There aren't many game concepts which work with just one button. Actually, having just one button is so absurd that people turned this particular limitation into a competition (similar to <=4kB and the like).
- AshleysBrain 14y ago
  In case you didn't know, the post is by the author of the ImpactJS game engine. The job of engine writers is to make sure everything works - working around it for one specific game helps only that game, but does not ensure all games using the engine will work. So the next best thing the engine author can do is pressure the OS maker (Apple) in to fixing the bug, which is what this post is about, since there is no feasible way an engine or library can work around problems like this in general.
nsfmc 14y ago
swipe to jump?