Dom’s Base - About interactive 3D content and tech, 3dvia Virtools, maxscript, 3ds max, music and more

Maybe you know Matthew. He was a very active Virtools user for many years and also published some casual games using it. Roughly a year ago he started to use Unity (for diverse reasons) and ported 'I hate clowns'. Now he released a new game using Unity, called Splume. It's a color-match game with a springy physics aspect.

While having a short look at it, I see some usability problems - it's a bit off-topic as it's partly due the Unity webplayer

I can't see a quick way to mute audio
it tracks mouse clicks outside the window or even when I am in another browser TAB
I can't pause the game or even better the Unity player. Thus it takes resources while I am at other web pages
where do I adjust fullscreen resolution and AA?

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3 Comments »

About pausing issue when you're in another window - on which OS/browser that happens? We can't reproduce it here. I know the game does not pause when being in another tab, we're working on that. I hope it will be fixed in Unity web player update soon, along with mouse clicks being tracked when outside the content.

Comment by Aras Pranckevicius — Thursday, 25th October, 2007 @ 10:08
Aras, i wasn't precise: window meant the ActiveX window thus what you mentioned as 'context'. (EDIT: oh indeed i wrote "other windows" in the other line … hm can't reproduce this now neither … sorry for that - I remove that from the article)

For the mouseclicks … I don't know unity (yet) but maybe that's something that can be done by the developer (unity user) too. Recently I did some prototyping targeting the Virtools webplayer … and I wind up ignoring DOWN events outside the 3d window, but still tracked UP events as, I my case, I would otherwise have got corrupt input states.

Comment by dominique — Thursday, 25th October, 2007 @ 01:18
NO NO tracking the mouse outside the window is a GOOD THING! It should be an option the developer can control. We have this problem in Flash, where the mouse stops being tracked when it is outside the window and it is a major pain in the ass for some kinds of games. Flash 4 player used to be able to track outside, and then with Flash 5 they removed that ability. It broke some interesting kinds of User Interface. For example, imagine a widget where you click down on it, and hold it while moving the mouse up and down to change a value. If this widget is close to the top or bottom of the screen, it won't work correctly, because mouse tracking will disable rather quickly. I can show you an example of this: http://www.sporeproductions.com/games/Golf-game.html Click "Play Guide" and then next, next until you see all the game UI appear. Now look at the bottom right at the three widget. The right most one is the best example. It's a blue arrow. If you click down on it, hold the mouse button, and move the mouse left and right. See the arrow rotate well when moving left, but not so well when moving right? That's because the mouse tracking stops as soon as the mouse moves outside the right side of the window. This interface used to work flawlessly until Macromedia removed mouse tracking outside the window. If Unity removes this ability too, it will screw up such interfaces, and also will screw up some direct game controls, like for example flying a plane.

Comment by Arby — Saturday, 26th January, 2008 @ 08:10