darwinian, on Apr 9 2005, 04:14 AM, said:

I have found that you can also get 'nades by making a simple verticle line, starting at the bottom. Much the same way that you can get rockets by making a simple horizontal line. That seems to clear up most of the 'nade / engineeer confusion for me.View Post

That's funny, cos I sometimes manage to get engineers with a single upward vertical line! :S

Heh, and I get officers by simply clicking and releasing again. However that gesture recognition system works, it is not very well executed.
That's the problem, if I'm in the heat of battle, needing another squad and an officer shows up instead. Especially when I have a low framerate
How can it confuse a triangle, standing on the base, drawn clockwise, with a V, drawn counter-clockwise?

Ask Chris™

Perhaps once the task manager has been researched to a certain level the user would be able to use buttons or something.

I sure do love suggesting features that will never be implimented.

Arion, on Apr 6 2005, 05:42 AM, said:

I bet when they made up that gesture nonsense, they never thought about trackpads and that it's a little more difficult to do such exact movements with it.

I've heard this complaint a lot, that trackpads are difficult to use with precision.

I've been using trackpads for years, and it's not difficult at all, so long as your hands are dry and you only touch one finger to the pad at once.

I've played through the demo without difficulty on a Powebook G4 1GHz----waiting on my reg code now.

Michael B, on Apr 7 2005, 01:32 PM, said:

I really like the concept - it worked fine on Garden for me. But it seems ropey in all other levels since that...

Ashtar, you said "It seems that precision is MUCH less important that speed in drawing." I wonder if this might be the key. For those of us having framerate problems, the visual feedback on the gesture lags quite badly, so it's not obvious, for example, where the system registered the mouse-down as the glowing line didn't start until halfway along the first "stroke" of the gesture. On the other hand if we press and hold, drawing slowly, so the glowing line can keep up, maybe the system picks up too many wobbles and can't analyse the result correctly.
View Post

I think that's exactly it. It wouldn't work if I drew the gestures slowly.

I never had any trouble with the system, aside from engineer/grenade confusion two or three times throughout the entire game. I use an inexpensive (get off the trackpad and stop complaining, laptop users!) mini-mouse and the game generally runs at 15-25 frames per second.

Well, now because it's only running at 5fps on Temple, the game isn't always responding to mouse clicks (to move units) or the Airstrike gesture. Hence I can't get to the damn virus email quick enough to airstrike it. It's interesting the things which slow down with the framerate (unit movement, grenade travelling through air) and the things which don't (grenade timing), or so it seems to me...

Edit: well, I managed it, by sending hundreds of Darwinians to their deaths. But they cleared the way for my squad to reach the infected spam mail. Now I've finished, and am looking forward to playing it again once they've sorted out the terrible framerates. Or when I get a G5. Whichever is sooner...

This post has been edited by Michael B : 18 April 2005 - 05:28 AM

I think the gesture system would be fine if the mouse weren't so laggy. As it is I can barely do even the most basic gestures without my mouse going all over the place. And I have a really good mouse, a Logitech MX1000, so it's not the mouse's fault.

Gesture recognition isn't a huge problem for me. The game has to be really slow (2-3 FPS) before I can't make it work.

However, the fact that units stop responding to move orders----that's a problem. Doesn't matter if I can activate airstrikes, if I can't move the squad into position to launch it.