REQUEST Game selection / filter screen suggestions

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DorffMeister
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REQUEST Game selection / filter screen suggestions

Postby DorffMeister » Mon Jun 19, 2017 9:48 pm

Using the game selection screen, I had a few suggestions.

1. Pressing X (button to the left of A/B/X/Y) could delete the last typed character (backspace)
2. left / right bumper could move the cursor left, right in the text filter / input. Trigger could do this, too, if not used for something else.
3. The wait time after entering characters seems long
4. Sliding search would be a nice alternative to not needing wildcards, such as "zeldaoc" could match "the legend of zelda ocarina of time"
5. (at odds with #4) I really like the filter in the PS4 store where you do the first letter and it shows the games that match that, and then all the possible next characters. Pick the second character and it filters the list and gives you all the options of the third character. Pressing B at any time removes the last character selection. See in PS4 store when searching for games. This search doesn't make sense to be sliding (as suggested in #4) . The first character choice is all letters found in all titles.

Keep up the amazing work! Is the whole thing written in Java? Have you explored Kotlin? I'm a Java/Groovy dev during the day and Kotlin looks really slick for Android development.

Kevin
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fcatrin
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Re: REQUEST Game selection / filter screen suggestions

Postby fcatrin » Tue Jun 20, 2017 2:52 am

DorffMeister wrote:Using the game selection screen, I had a few suggestions.

1. Pressing X (button to the left of A/B/X/Y) could delete the last typed character (backspace)


Now that I'm translating the gamepad codes (all controls have different buttons!) I think that this doable!

DorffMeister wrote:2. left / right bumper could move the cursor left, right in the text filter / input. Trigger could do this, too, if not used for something else.


Good!

DorffMeister wrote:3. The wait time after entering characters seems long


I have my doubts in this, I made a lot of testing trying to find a sweet spot between accidental searchs and real searchs. The original problem is that a search slows down the system and it specially noticeable in big collections on relatively slow devices, so each accidental search is a slow down in the text entering process. So I finally settled in a time that is a) not long enough to make the user feel that nothing is happening and b) not short enough to trigger additional searchs. But that may vary from user to user which seems to be the case

If we are taking more input from the controls, may be I can add the option for the user to press START to begin the search immediately instead of waiting 1 second for the search to trigger itself (yes, the wait time is only 1 second).

DorffMeister wrote:4. Sliding search would be a nice alternative to not needing wildcards, such as "zeldaoc" could match "the legend of zelda ocarina of time"
5. (at odds with #4) I really like the filter in the PS4 store where you do the first letter and it shows the games that match that, and then all the possible next characters. Pick the second character and it filters the list and gives you all the options of the third character. Pressing B at any time removes the last character selection. See in PS4 store when searching for games. This search doesn't make sense to be sliding (as suggested in #4) . The first character choice is all letters found in all titles.


I found 5 to be too inconsistent. I like the 4 better.

Currently the search is done in all the text, then is ordered depending on the position in the text. For example a search for letter A will throw:

ALADDIN (A in the first position)
LASER GATES (A in the second position)
LUNAR LANDER (A in the fourth position)

If I change the search for "LA" then the order will be

LASER GATES (LA in the first position)
ALADDIN (LA in the second position)
LUNAR LANDER (LA way before the second position)

I would say that the text is searched in any part of the name and then it is ordered by relevance.

Now, if I understand your request, is tht to ignore the spaces in the search?

DorffMeister wrote:Keep up the amazing work! Is the whole thing written in Java? Have you explored Kotlin? I'm a Java/Groovy dev during the day and Kotlin looks really slick for Android development.


Oh no. I took a look at it and I found it very awful to be honest. It just too error prone to my style of coding or to what I expect to get from a language to be trusted. It looks fine for small examples and demos, but I would never consider it for big projects like RetroX (currently 80.000+ lines of code).

I've been in a similar position in the past with Python, it looked very simple and "cool", but after the project grew it turned to be a hell: unreadable, untrustable, unmaintanable (for me). If preferred to drop the code instead of continue working on it, it is not a suprise for me to see a lot of abandoned python projects because of that.

For what I saw about Kotlin, it shares the same problems. For now it is seen as cool for a lot of people but in my experience its "improvements" are most like "alarms" for me to not use it.
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DorffMeister
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Re: REQUEST Game selection / filter screen suggestions

Postby DorffMeister » Tue Jun 20, 2017 7:05 pm

Regarding delay before performing searches, how long does it take to update the list after making a change to the filter? I'd love to have filters applied (nearly) instantly if the system can handle that. The wait time of 1 second feels like an eternity to me when I know what I am searching for. My preference is by the time I pound out "mari" or "zeld" into the faux-keyboard when I look down I'd love it if the list was already filtered.

I think the changing the ordering based on "early position" could confuse users (I found it to be surprising when you stated it). My personal preference is to always order by title, potentially highlighting the match in the on-screen title. Ordering by title while still ignoring words like (a, an, the) probably provides the least surprise. My reasoning is my brain can scan a sorted list very quickly but if the ordering is not sorted (in any way my brain detects quickly), I have to search for my results by looking at each and every item. "early weighting" also doesn't feel like it would make sense for "The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past". I am searching for Zelda, so the important thing is that it is there SOMEWHERE.

Regarding sliding search filtering "is that to ignore the spaces?" My goal is to ignore extra characters that I don't care about so I can provide a minimal filter. Perhaps the titles are "The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past", "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time". I filter "zelda" (or maybe even just "zel") I have both. But if I add in "o" it becomes clear that an ''o" follows "zelda" (or "zel") somewhere in the title, further narrowing. If I enter "zelo" think of it as searching the titles with /.*z.*e.*l.*o.*/. The order of the letters matter but their position doesn't. This would make it easy to avoid characters like ":" when filtering.

Also, if I am looking for "Super Mario All-Stars" it would be nice if I could just filter with "allstar" and not have it get tripped up with the "-". I I don't know that RetroX is getting tripped up by the dash, I am just speaking theoretically with all of this.
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Re: REQUEST Game selection / filter screen suggestions

Postby fcatrin » Tue Jun 20, 2017 11:54 pm

DorffMeister wrote:Regarding delay before performing searches, how long does it take to update the list after making a change to the filter? I'd love to have filters applied (nearly) instantly if the system can handle that. The wait time of 1 second feels like an eternity to me when I know what I am searching for. My preference is by the time I pound out "mari" or "zeld" into the faux-keyboard when I look down I'd love it if the list was already filtered.


The search starts as soon as the user stop pressing the buttons for 1 second. That gives him the time to complete the input and not to slow down the device while he is still typing. The time that the device will take to show the results depends on the device speed only. Note that if RetroX would start a search after each keypress, you would get that same delay for each letter that you add, which in my testing was too awful to leave it as it was.

DorffMeister wrote:I think the changing the ordering based on "early position" could confuse users (I found it to be surprising when you stated it). My personal preference is to always order by title, potentially highlighting the match in the on-screen title. Ordering by title while still ignoring words like (a, an, the) probably provides the least surprise. My reasoning is my brain can scan a sorted list very quickly but if the ordering is not sorted (in any way my brain detects quickly), I have to search for my results by looking at each and every item. "early weighting" also doesn't feel like it would make sense for "The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past". I am searching for Zelda, so the important thing is that it is there SOMEWHERE.


May be my example was not too good. The list is ordered alphabetically first and by relevance second. For exmaple if you have these games:

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Zelda: A Link to the Past

If you search by Zelda, you will see

Zelda: A Link to the Past
Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

That's because the first one is more similar to your search. The third one is less relevant.

I think your example is a special case, because as a human you recognize Zelda to be the main character. If you think in other searches where there are several games with the word included, I prefer to show first what is most similar to what the user is looking for.

Think of this case:

Metal Out Run (doesn't exist just an example)
Out Runners
Out Run

The user search for the game Out Run, Retro X will show

Out Run
Out Runners
Metal Out Run

Because it doesn't matter that the Metal Out Run is before in the alphabet. What matters is that the user is targetting Out Run and not other variants. If the user is looking for "metal" he will find Metal Out Run first

DorffMeister wrote:Regarding sliding search filtering "is that to ignore the spaces?" My goal is to ignore extra characters that I don't care about so I can provide a minimal filter. Perhaps the titles are "The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past", "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time". I filter "zelda" (or maybe even just "zel") I have both. But if I add in "o" it becomes clear that an ''o" follows "zelda" (or "zel") somewhere in the title, further narrowing. If I enter "zelo" think of it as searching the titles with /.*z.*e.*l.*o.*/. The order of the letters matter but their position doesn't. This would make it easy to avoid characters like ":" when filtering.

Also, if I am looking for "Super Mario All-Stars" it would be nice if I could just filter with "allstar" and not have it get tripped up with the "-". I I don't know that RetroX is getting tripped up by the dash, I am just speaking theoretically with all of this.


I like the idea except for the "zelo" case, I think it is not intuitive at all. I like the idea of dropping the symbols and words like "the" from the search. I think I will include that.
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cydetrakd
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Re: REQUEST Game selection / filter screen suggestions

Postby cydetrakd » Sun Aug 13, 2017 5:50 pm

Please have a way to get to the top and bottom of the list especially for things like mame roms.

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