On 14 Feb 2013, at 07:25, Renk Thorsten <thorsten.i.r...@jyu.fi> wrote:
> My goal is to be able to simulate a realistic seasonal change of the terrain
> by _suitable_ slider adjustments which need to be chosen based on region,
> vegetation and conditions. My goal is not to make any combination of slider
> adjustments work everywhere.
>
> But if there is otherwise general consensus that we should operate FG in such
> a mode as to prevent unrealistic user input, just let me know, and I remove
> the environment postprocessing from GIT and keep it in my own devel branch. I
> am decidedly not keen on feedback along the lines 'Oh, look, if I adjust the
> sliders like that, it really looks bad!'
>
> So if climate change affects your region and you believe that vegetation
> doesn't get all brown, then just do not move the slider all the way. It's as
> simple as that, and I really shouldn't need to write that here.
Not trying to pick on Thorsten here, but in the general case, this is a
dangerous approach where end-users are concerned :)
In general, giving users choice is bad. What developers should do, is figure
out what the user *wanted*, and then do it. Excessive choices / options /
preferences are a failure to be sufficiently smart, about what the user
actually wants.
(Here ends the user-experience lecture)
In this specific case, that means there shouldn't be a slider, there should be
some additional values in a place that can be customised per-region. Since what
the *user* wants is that in the region they are in, the colours / effect look
plausible - that's all. Messing around with sliders they don't really
understand, is not a good thing for them to be doing.
If a *developer* (which, in our case is often conflated with 'user', but that's
often a mistake that most Linux/open-source projects make in UX design) thinks
it can be improved for a region, then they make the appropriate XML edits and
submit them.
Yhis approach is the most complicated to maintain, but also quite easy to
*support*, because the potential for users to break themselves is limited.
Giving lots of controls (checkboxes, properties, etc) to users to twiddle is
easier to maintain, but a nightmare to *support*, as we experienced with the
original shader management system :)
James
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