(no subject)
Jun. 7th, 2005 03:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_tectonicJust got back from a short coding-break walk along the bikepath behind the lab. Saw a whole bunch of ladybugs on a plant. Also got a good look at the leetle-bebby prarie dogs in the adjacent open space. They are much smaller than the ones I saw earlier in the season that I thought were babies, so I guess those ones are adolescents. That means that prarie dogs either take more than a year to mature, or they have multiple litters of offspring each year. I have no idea which is true.
I'm making slower progress on my own, but it's happening. The game end sequence is much cleaner now, and I got the final debriefing window to hang out long enough to be read.
Still loathe java swing just as much as ever. I think the core concept of good UI design (and hence, good design period, for any product which is meant to be used by people, which is basically all of them) can be summed up as follows: whatever it is that people are going to do with your product most of the time, it should be good at that. If there's a common use, that should correspond to the default behavior. If there's an obvious way to interact with it, that should do something sensible. Don't punt on sensible defaults because they're more work -- that's just laziness. If you can't figure out what sensible defaults are, you have no business designing the product.
I don't think the developers of swing even had a concept of "default behavior"; they just have code that happens to function even when attributes are unset. Bad, bad, bad design, and utterly inexcusable, given that John Osterhout (designer of Tcl/Tk, which has very, very good defaults) was working at Sun at the time. I suspect that part of their mandate may have been "make sure it looks as little like Tk as possible, so we don't have to pay him any royalties".
I'm making slower progress on my own, but it's happening. The game end sequence is much cleaner now, and I got the final debriefing window to hang out long enough to be read.
Still loathe java swing just as much as ever. I think the core concept of good UI design (and hence, good design period, for any product which is meant to be used by people, which is basically all of them) can be summed up as follows: whatever it is that people are going to do with your product most of the time, it should be good at that. If there's a common use, that should correspond to the default behavior. If there's an obvious way to interact with it, that should do something sensible. Don't punt on sensible defaults because they're more work -- that's just laziness. If you can't figure out what sensible defaults are, you have no business designing the product.
I don't think the developers of swing even had a concept of "default behavior"; they just have code that happens to function even when attributes are unset. Bad, bad, bad design, and utterly inexcusable, given that John Osterhout (designer of Tcl/Tk, which has very, very good defaults) was working at Sun at the time. I suspect that part of their mandate may have been "make sure it looks as little like Tk as possible, so we don't have to pay him any royalties".
no subject
Date: 2005-06-07 03:48 pm (UTC)I'll keep my comments on swing to a mere sympathetic "blech."
But what I really meant to write is a request for more info about your game, 'cause I'm curious. So, I know it's a simulation, and that it's geology related; can you share more? I've been curious ever since you briefly described it before, and when dan showed me your webpage, my recollection is that I didn't find a description that fit what you described then; so I gave up.
If it's Top Seekrit / related to your eeeevil plans for World Domination, that's OK, I'll wait in suspense until the plans are unleashed...
no subject
Date: 2005-06-07 04:02 pm (UTC)"DLUG, the Disaster Land-Use Game, is a four-player virtual strategy boardgame about the interaction between natural disasters and urban planning."
I'll post more, probably including a link to the game's website; I just have to do some cleanup before I start throwing promo stuff around... (It's always possible the link will find its way to a potential user, and I want to maximize my chances of catching their interest!)
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Date: 2005-06-07 04:26 pm (UTC)Wait. Actually, I can find it with no trouble at all, without even knowing your name. Never mind.
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Date: 2005-06-07 04:36 pm (UTC)Seriously, the screen-shot looks hypercool.
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Date: 2005-06-07 04:30 pm (UTC)...my initial impression, based on the one-sentence description, is: "the cool parts of sim city, the disasters and planning around them; with 4 players instead of 1 and presumably better realism surrounding results from the natural disasters. So, no UFOs or Godzilla."
(...Leading me to wonder; is Godzilla a natural disaster, and if not, shouldn't he be?)