Message #1267

From: Melinda Green <melinda@superliminal.com>
Subject: Re: [MC4D] Re: Announcing MC4D for Android
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2010 23:32:02 -0800

Andrey,

I like your idea for double click rotate-to-center. I don’t think that
Android touch events recognize double clicks but I could try to detect
that. For now I’m going to not introduce 4D rotations just to try to
keep this as simple as possible while trying to make it somewhat useful.
I’ve updated the app to not add scramble twists of the outer face, and I
only use slice mask = 1 so all scrambles should be possible for users to
undo. I also tried to make the autorotation less sensitive. I think
these are good improvements. Clearly this is still difficult to use with
any accuracy but see what you think.

It is an interesting suggestion to try to restrict to only 90 degree
rotations and just go by the 2D sticker polygons like with the 2^4. I
don’t think that will avoid all the miss-clicks because it would still
easy to click between the cracks and hit some completely unexpected
sticker. I spent some time tonight experimenting with switching to the
2^4, and with the above improvements (plus only using 90 degree scramble
twists) I found it to be quite workable. The simplicity may make users
happier but then I balked when thinking about how to explain the
polygon-based twist UI. Thinking of the typical user who doesn’t read
instructions I worry that they’d have even less chance of figuring out
what’s going on. I started feeling that it might be impossible to make
the UI both discoverable and useful. That made me leave it as a 3^4
which is mostly just good for demos but not really good as any sort of
puzzle, practice or otherwise. The 3^4 just has too many stickers for a
smartphone screen, and the 2^4 UI works pretty well but is screwy. I’m
very open to any suggestions.

-Melinda

On 11/26/2010 9:35 PM, Andrey wrote:
> Melinda,
> I think that I can suggest a couple of things for Android version.
> First, it may be better to keep only 90-degrees twists. And select axes of twists by large faces of cubes, not by stickers. That is if you click a corner sticker, axis of rotation will depend on the face of this sticker that you clicked.
> Second, 4D dragging is a funny thing, of course, but for the real puzzle it’s enough to give users "recenter" command. I don’t know possible Android commands, but something like double-tap could do the trick (if such thing exists there).
> With this two options (and without autorotation!) it may be very possible to solve a puzzle in one session before phone’s battery goes empty :)