dcr66 wrote:
Whatever you and Nick decide to do, it should have better usability for tablets (IPod, etc.) and handheld device (IPhone, Android, BlackBerry). Few things you can do:
Limit the map size. If the ships sail too far, they have disengaged. 0 points for anybody. If everybody chicken out, the last side on board wins. If you choose to do that, you need to mark the map edge with some distinctive boundary so people will see it.
Put the Ship control where the Ship Status currently is. I rarely use the ship status. If I need to know the status, I will just do a MouseOver or MouseMove on the ship graphics.
If limiting map size is not desirable, what about an IFrame or something like that on the map itself. Hence the UI stays the same size and the user will have to scroll the map separately. You need to check whether such implementation is workable in tablet and smartphone.
2 interface behaviors: one for regular browsers and the other one for tablet/smarphone.
As far as I know, the current movement window cannot be dragged on Ipad2 (see
http://www.youplay.it/play/forum_showmessage.asp?msgid=104627 ).
I will try to change the code we use so that it's draggable on those touch screens too.
However, apart from that, I have no idea on how the site looks like on those devices as I own none of them.
I suppose that some of those devices have small screens so the interface should be adjusted to account for that: can you describe how it is playing with those devices if you own them? What are the main difficulties?
Also, if you can send me some pictures of how the game looks on them it would be great - developing an interface without knowing how it looks is quite difficult otherwise
Try Google "emulator" along with the hand held device type "blackberry", "iphone", "windows phone 7" or "android". You should get some results. I have tried none of them so I cannot tell you what they can do. For BlackBerry you see the same layout as a regular browser but only a portion of it will fit on the screen, you have to pan around a lot more.
