Action button labels, again

[SNESFAN]

I think the idea got shot down by people originally, but maybe the button graphics just weren't right.

For me the problem is that there is no inherent connection with button position for the elements so if we're told to press the AIR button in game then concious thought  / learning has to take place to press the left button, also being told to press the Fire button could lead to a bit of confusion with us oldies who are used to joystick buttons in general being called the fire button.

Using the elements as button labels also strikes me as Uber Nerdy / likely to appeal to 14 year old D&D players and people like me, of course (a 45 year old ex D&D playing hippy).

Still waiting for someone who would not be easily able to press the correct button if we used the cardinal points of the compass (+ NW & SW for the extra 2 buttons).

I can feel ya on that, I'm not saying it's intuitive by any means, nor is it better than cardinal directions, my stance is purely on flavor and meeting the requirements for "not a bad system", just not necessarily be the "best system"

Then there's always the factor of you getting used to it in time. Also the geek in me sees it as a cooler system regardless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_element

 

[Binky]

I think the confusion over 'fire' and 'fire' (symbol vs action) could cause real problems.

Either it forces devs to assign button actions in a particular, possibly inappropriate way, or makes writing help texts a nightmare.

"press fire to jump"

"press <void> to continue"

etc.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

I think the idea got shot down by people originally, but maybe the button graphics just weren't right.

For me the problem is that there is no inherent connection with button position for the elements so if we're told to press the AIR button in game then concious thought  / learning has to take place to press the left button, also being told to press the Fire button could lead to a bit of confusion with us oldies who are used to joystick buttons in general being called the fire button.

Using the elements as button labels also strikes me as Uber Nerdy / likely to appeal to 14 year old D&D players and people like me, of course (a 45 year old ex D&D playing hippy).

Still waiting for someone who would not be easily able to press the correct button if we used the cardinal points of the compass (+ NW & SW for the extra 2 buttons).

I get East and West mixed up. As in I can't remember which is left and which is right.

 

[SNESFAN]

I don't get east and west mixed up (clockwise, Never Eat Shredded Wheat)

but sometimes I forget which direction the sun rises and sets  :wacko:

 

[_wb_]

I think the idea got shot down by people originally, but maybe the button graphics just weren't right.

For me the problem is that there is no inherent connection with button position for the elements so if we're told to press the AIR button in game then concious thought  / learning has to take place to press the left button, also being told to press the Fire button could lead to a bit of confusion with us oldies who are used to joystick buttons in general being called the fire button.

Using the elements as button labels also strikes me as Uber Nerdy / likely to appeal to 14 year old D&D players and people like me, of course (a 45 year old ex D&D playing hippy).

Still waiting for someone who would not be easily able to press the correct button if we used the cardinal points of the compass (+ NW & SW for the extra 2 buttons).

I get East and West mixed up. As in I can't remember which is left and which is right.

That is an easy confusion to make indeed.

In English, it is "West" and "East".

In French, it is "Ouest" and "Est".

In Dutch, it's "West" and "Oost".

So in French, O would be left, while in Dutch, O is right.

"orient" is the east, "occident" is the west, some words are rather confusing.

When talking about the wind, you always give the direction it is coming from (e.g. south-west), which is of course 180° opposite of the direction it is going in.

 

[WizardStan]

East? I thought you said Weast!

 

[Neelix]

I get East and West mixed up. As in I can't remember which is left and which is right.

Other than getting East and West confused,  How's your local geography?    Think of the City or Continent you are living in,   is there a side which is specifically known as being east or west?   For me,  it's easy,   If I think of a map of Australia, the leftmost third of the map is called "Western Australia".   If I think of a map of Melbourne,  I know that I'm in the South-Eastern suburbs and that I'm to the right of Melbourne on the map.

- Neelix

 

[_wb_]

I think the confusion over 'fire' and 'fire' (symbol vs action) could cause real problems.

Either it forces devs to assign button actions in a particular, possibly inappropriate way, or makes writing help texts a nightmare.

"press fire to jump"

"press <void> to continue"

etc.

I see your point, but that argument works both ways: it also gives devs an opportunity to assign button actions in a nice way:

"Press [FIRE] to shoot"

"Press [AIR] to jump"

"Press [EARTH] to dig down"

etc.

Since AIR/EARTH have such a nice connotation with (Page)UP/DOWN, I would propose to do it like this:

STAR               AIR

           WATER        FIRE

VOID            EARTH

or perhaps FIRE and WATER swapped, but you could say WATER/FIRE matches HOME/END in the BEGIN/END sense because WATER is "primordial soup", the beginning of all life, the mother womb if you want, while FIRE is the apocalyps, hell, cremation, the sun going supernova and ending it all

(of course you could also say FIRE is the Big Bang and WATER is the great flood that ends everything)

Anyway, should we use just the words, just the symbols, or both?

The symbols for AIR and EARTH can be used as is for PgUp/PgDn:

and as far as I'm concerned, that's clue enough to indicate that those buttons correspond to PgUp/PgDn (no need to write that out in text)

The ones for WATER and FIRE are less useful, since they're just triangles, and not properly orientated ones either...

(By the way, FIRE is ethymologically related to PYRE, and Latin PYRA, from Ancient Greek πυρά (purá), from πῦρ (pûr, “fire”), from Proto-Indo-European *péh₂ur.)

This page has a lot of info on elemental stuff from various old cultures:

http://www.friesian.com/elements.htm

An interesting idea there is that the elements can be associated with geometric shapes/objects:

WATER: circle, sphere

EARTH: square, cube

FIRE: triangle, tetrahedron

AIR: octahedron (which looks like an X if you look at it from the top)

Now, looking at this:

we could do something like this:

              △

             FIRE

 □    ○

EARTH        WATER

          ⨯

            AIR

but then the order is weird (AIR at the bottom?), Sony might sue us, and the link with Home/End/PgUp/PgDn is gone.

Perhaps something in between can be done though:

☆       △̶

STAR                 AIR

   Ins

             ☲                    ○

           FIRE                 WATER

              Home                           End

          ▽̶

VOID              EARTH

  Del

 

[TrashyMG]

sigh... 

 

[Ziz]

Round and round and round it goes,

where it stops, nobody knows...

 

[ZXDunny]

Round and round and round it goes,

where it stops, nobody knows...

It'll stop when ED produces the finalised item. And it'll be ABXY I II

D.

 

[_wb_]

Back to the compass directions, how about something like this:

Ins       ↟

                     NORTH

         

             ↞        ↠

        WEST                    EAST

                       ↡

Del               SOUTH

The double-arrows give a hint that the buttons can be used for navigation (like the dpad) but in "bigger steps", i.e. PgUp/PgDn/Home/End.

The compass directions correspond with the arrows and can be used as an unambiguous ASCII-only representation of the buttons.

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

Maybe Pyra buttons should stick to this

Spoiler

The Zen of Py[ra]thon

    Beautiful is better than ugly.
    Explicit is better than implicit.
    Simple is better than complex.
    Complex is better than complicated.
    Flat is better than nested.
    Sparse is better than dense.
    Readability counts.
    Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
    Although practicality beats purity.
    Errors should never pass silently.
    Unless explicitly silenced.
    In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
    There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
    Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
    Now is better than never.
    Although never is often better than *right* now.
    If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
    If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
    Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

 

[Grench]

I would propose to use the following Unicode symbols:

 ⌶      ⇞

    ⇤     ⇥ 

⌦     ⇟

That works for me.

"Problem" was "solved" three pages ago...

Function trumps fashion. Label the buttons with a symbol representing their actual OS input.

Done.

 

[WizardStan]

That's all fine and dandy but one man's beauty is another's ugly. Where one sees something as simple another sees complexity.

 

[Kev2442]

I'm quite happy with either NSEW or AEWF (elements). But for the later, that means having an upper label besides the PageHomeEnd ones. And I like the idea of a compass rose in the middle. So to date, it's NSEW-Plus-Minus for me.

 

[rygD]

 

[bzar]

We could also rotate the elemental symbols. Make AIR and EARTH point left and right to make them quite recognizibly Home and End, then have FIRE and WATER point the way they do. Now you have directional buttons, clearly differentiated page up/down from home/end, with a nice mythological background and easy referencing (left button, right button, etc).

 

[_wb_]

We could also rotate the elemental symbols. Make AIR and EARTH point left and right to make them quite recognizibly Home and End, then have FIRE and WATER point the way they do. Now you have directional buttons, clearly differentiated page up/down from home/end, with a nice mythological background and easy referencing (left button, right button, etc).

Something like this, then?


(I'm using Unicode approximations to the rotated symbols here using combining vertical strokes, this is far from perfect: the symbols should be symmetric)

     △

        FIRE

◁⃒        ▷⃒

AIR          EARTH

     ▽

      WATER


Yes, that kind of make sense. I like how the extra line distinguish Home/End from PgUp/PgDn.


AIR and EARTH could be swapped, if the element symbols are rotated anyway.


Would this order work well semantically? E.g. where would people expect to find a button to JUMP (AIR) and to SHOOT (FIRE) ?


I suppose we could also make the triangles point inwards, like the dpad on a PlayStation controller:

       ▽

         WATER

 ▷⃒         ◁⃒

EARTH            AIR

       △

            FIRE


That doesn't work very well for Home/End/PgUp/PgDn though.

 

[Nintendo]

I'm curious...

How are some of you going to feel when all of these non-conventional action button label ideas don't make the final cut?