Ricochet is an embarrassment!

[Cobra951]

OK, guys. I am a fan of your stuff in general. But what is up with the very poor stylus control in Ricochet? Other PPC games in this genre are butter-smooth, and Ricochet Xtreme and Lost Worlds on the PC have perfect mouse control. You really need to do something about this.

(Dell Axim X3, 400 MHz, 64/64 MB)

[Larry]

OK, guys. I am a fan of your stuff in general. But what is up with the very poor stylus control in Ricochet? Other PPC games in this genre are butter-smooth, and Ricochet Xtreme and Lost Worlds on the PC have perfect mouse control. You really need to do something about this.

(Dell Axim X3, 400 MHz, 64/64 MB)
Hi,

As Kieren mentioned in another thread I've spent a lot of time on trying to improve the tap control in Ricochet for PPC. Unfortunately I've not been able to solve the problem to my satisfaction.

The problem seems to be related to the general way we access the screen.At the moment we run with the Toolbar and Start Menu visible like most normal PPC applications but this seems to give problems with slowdowns if you are dragging the stylus.

We think we can solve this by moving to full screen games but then we will have to provide our own menu system etc. which will take a long time to develop. If all goes well then we will be doing this but we have not yet been able to schedule the developer time for such a fundamental update to our system.

I know this doesn't really help with the problem but I hope it help you understand why we haven't released the fix yet.

Thanks.

[Cobra951]

Thanks for the reply. Sorry for the belligerent tone of my 1st message, but frankly I was shocked. It's basically unplayable with the stylus on my PPC, and the buttons are a poor substitute in this kind of game.

I'm a software guy myself, and I sympathize. Sometimes the little things bite us in the behind, and we're left in the hot seat, trying to explain to the less technical why something that looks simple really is not.

[Larry]

Thanks for the reply. Sorry for the belligerent tone of my 1st message, but frankly I was shocked. It's basically unplayable with the stylus on my PPC, and the buttons are a poor substitute in this kind of game.

I'm a software guy myself, and I sympathize. Sometimes the little things bite us in the behind, and we're left in the hot seat, trying to explain to the less technical why something that looks simple really is not.
lol, now that's something that makes me mad.

Why do so many of the device makers feel the need to mess with the stylus input?

On the PPC some devices get slowdowns if you drag on the screen and on some PalmOS the full screen text entry can block pen input if you don't jump through the right hoops.

Life would be much easier if they provided a simple API so you could specify that you need fast, reliable pen input without having to also loose all the menu support :(