NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/comp/sys/ibm/pc/games/22164

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-17 | 1.7 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!idacrd![e-mail]
From: [e-mail] (David desJardins)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games
Subject: Re: Warlords user interface
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 17 Nov 92 18:17:44 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail]
Organization: IDA Center for Communications Research, Princeton
Lines: 26

Here is a summary of responses to my query about the Warlords user
interface.  Every respondent agreed to some extent that the interface
is flaky and difficult to use.  Of course most of the respondents were
people who enjoy and play the game despite this.

Further experimentation has revealed that the fundamental problem which
caused most of my frustration is that the mouse buttons are not
debounced.  What that means is that holding down the mouse button for
too long is equivalent to clicking it repeatedly.  THIS IS JUST WRONG.
I can't remember ever using another piece of software which had this
property.

This causes many of the effects I complained about.  For example, when I
double click, what usually happens is that one of the two clicks comes
out long enough to seem like a double click itself.  That means I get a
triple click, which is equivalent to a double followed by a single, or
something like that.

I suspect, although I don't have any easy way to verify this, that the
problem gets worse as the computer gets faster.  If the maximum length
of a single click gets shorter as the clock rate of the computer speeds
up, it is going to get harder and harder to use.  I have a 386/33.
Perhaps the correspondents who found the interface less annoying than I
do have slower machines.

                                        David desJardins