RE: [Arianne-devel] Usability Test

[Miguel A. B. L. <mig...@ho...>]

>I installed Stendhal on my laptop (inluding server and MySQL), and let some 
>people try out the game before my eyes. Mainly I was interested in the 
>reaction of children (mine, and others), to see how easy it is for them to 
>use the game. These are my observations (true for children and adults 
>alike):

Nice.

>While it may seem helpful to have every creature or object a context-menu, 
>it is extraordinarily difficult to be fast enough with aiming, 
>right-clicking, and choosing the correct menu-selection for anything 
>moving.

I agree, I have occasionally suffered it too.

>My (ideal) idea:
>1. Have a right-click select the targeted creature, or, optional with some 
>hidden wayfinding, select the *nearest* creature or object to that point on 
>the screen (this is non-trivial, but would help slow people, like children, 
>a lot).
>2. have the selected object/creature "highlighted" (like the red 
>attack-mark, but in, let's say, gold or green, or whatever colour, but not 
>blue), so that the player gets feedback he has the right (or wrong) 
>selection, and knows, he has now time to decide what to do with it.
>3. some easy accessible hotkey (like the third mouse-button) then would 
>allow circling through available creatures nearby, if it was the wrong 
>object/creature (This suggestion is really optional, ignore it in case of 
>doubt).
>4. right thereafter a menu pops up, that allows for the desired option, and 
>can be closed with ESC
>5. It might be a good idea to have this options iconized somehow (like in 
>Ultima 6), instead of text, so that people who cannot read english, or 
>cannot read at all, at least have a chance to play the game intuitively.
>6. To be able to talk to someone, this should be the way: Aim, right-click, 
>any input on the chat-line addresses the highlighted creature. No more 
>chasing around someone I want to talk to... :)

ok, written down.
I will do my best.

>Everyone has its idea about movement. The direction-keys are not intuitive 
>in an isometric game. Left-click, and there-you-go-right-now seems to be 
>what people expect, and try out first. I had to tell the about the 
>direction-keys every time. It surprised me a bit as well... :-)

:)

>How about some menu-option to baptize them?

ok.

>Otherwise, when I started two clients parallelly to show it is truly 
>multiplayer, after closing the windows, both javaw.exe stayed in memory. I 
>could not repeat it constantly, so if anyone makes this observation as 
>well, have a look...

It should be already fixed. It was a bug.