Re: [Alephmodular-devel] Friendlier Preferences

[Woody Z. I. <woo...@sb...>]

On Friday, January 3, 2003, at 12:47  AM, Alexander Strange wrote:

> On Friday, January 3, 2003, at 02:21  AM, Mark Levin wrote:
>> (On a related note, A1's preferences are hideously complex and 
>> overdesigned... Does the user really need to be able to configure the 
>> type of texture filtering used?)
>
> Definitely. I would prefer a sliding bar going between "Conserve VRAM" 
> and "Increase Prettiness", or something of that nature.

I'm surprised that a bunch of Mac users don't demand better.

If we're trying to build preferences that are user-friendly, there 
should be either no option (the game profiles its own behavior and 
determines automatically what settings give the best quality while 
maintaining performance), or a slider to trade off between "Image 
Quality" and "Frame Rate" (or "Speed").  I suspect Unreal Tournament 
intended to do something along these lines with its "Target Frame-Rate" 
slider - I assume its intention was to maximize quality while 
maintaining the user-specified frame-rate.  Shrug, my Windows machine is 
a Celeron-400 with 128 MB RAM and a 16 MB RIVA TNT, so it's sort of 
barely able to run UT at all - I haven't been able to detect any effect 
that slider may have.

Note that it may be nice to have a 'standard preferences' setting (like 
the above) and an 'expert preferences' option (giving detailed control 
over everything), so people who really like to fiddle with such things 
can still do so.

But anyway this is like a tangent of a tangent by now, and surely won't 
become important in AM for quite some time...

Woody