MIPI woes, good design ideas and headaches


Blank?  I think not. That would be even worse than the current situation with the Pandora - there'd be no easy way to indicate which button to press at all!
Not that many layouts in gaming. Are you really telling me you wouldn't remember the layouts for the games?
 
Blank?  I think not. That would be even worse than the current situation with the Pandora - there'd be no easy way to indicate which button to press at all!
Not that many layouts in gaming. Are you really telling me you wouldn't remember the layouts for the games?
I think he's talking about the awkwardness of writing or reading instructions when the buttons aren't labelled. (eg. my "Select and XXYBA" example from Yoshi's Island)
 
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Well I don't care what the buttons are called but they need to easily referred to so being blank is a stupid idea. I would say make them colours but this doesn't help people with colour blindness.
 
I think he's talking about the awkwardness of writing or reading instructions when the buttons aren't labelled.
Exactly!

Well I don't care what the buttons are called but they need to easily referred to so being blank is a stupid idea. I would say make them colours but this doesn't help people with colour blindness.
You could label them as well.  e.g.  Red, Blu, Grn,  Ylw, Blk, Wht   That way even colour blind people would be able to identify the key.

- Neelix
 
Well I don't care what the buttons are called but they need to easily referred to so being blank is a stupid idea. I would say make them colours but this doesn't help people with colour blindness.
You could label them as well.  e.g.  Red, Blu, Grn,  Ylw, Blk, Wht   That way even colour blind people would be able to identify the key.

- Neelix
That's still awkward. I actually sort of like the Greek letters idea. They'd be pleasing to the eye and it shouldn't be too difficult to set up Compose key bindings or pull them from a character map utility.

The only downside is that, beyond alpha, beta, omega, and possibly lambda, English speakers without a certain degree of university mathematics education are likely to get the names wrong.
 
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People who are say red-green colourblind can still discriminate between red and green things because the eye is less sensitive to red than green, so red things appear darker. As long as we don't make the buttons bright red and dark green, we'll be okay.


I do like the greek letter idea, though I can imagine the boards being full of 'press the upsilon key', 'what's an upsilon key?' for a few weeks at least.
 
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Damn, these are only 5 symbols. ^^"

3747319362_dd983c2119_o.jpg


 
 
Fusion_Power, on 18 Feb 2014 - 11:11 AM, said: Damn, these are only 5 symbols. ^^" Damn... you know I'd almost be willing to settle for 5 gaming buttons just to be able to use that idea... ;)
^ We could just have a pentagram button in the center...
 
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How about Greek letters that also refer to the non-game function of the keys? E.g. Alpha-Omega for home-end, Upsilon-Delta for pgup-pgdn, something like that... we could use capital Greek letters:
 
   Y
A   Ω
   Δ
 
(that would accidentally put A and Y in the same places as on the Pandora)
 
or lower case Greek letters:
 
  υ
α  ω
  δ
 
I prefer the look of capital letters. The letters for the other two buttons would depend on their non-game use.
 
The downside of using capital alpha and capital upsilon is that they are the same as the Latin letters, so the ambiguity problem Neelix described is still there.
There are enough nice capital Greek letters available that cannot be confused with Latin letters though, so we may want to use only those, e.g. Γ Δ Θ Λ Ξ Π Σ Φ Ψ Ω
 
Or we could use lower case only and have some kind of "backwards compatibility", by using alpha-beta-chi-upsilon instead of ABXY and two extra letters for the new keys (gamma-zeta?).

Or we could use the six buttons to spell some 6-letter word, e.g. ΔΡΑΓΟΝ or ΔBΠYΡA.
 
I think there is something fun and geek like about this Greek idea, although I don't personally feel it is actually a good idea. Some reasons for this:

  • I believe that most people will not know what these symbols are (or how to say them)
  • Games wishing to display button prompts may ideally use some standard graphics, but realistically, taking into account busy lives and lazy developers, we are more likely for developers to use a font and put 'Press A' or 'Press Start', most games probably don't include Greek characters in their font sheet
  • Some font systems are not unicode, and lots of font strings are hard coded into source files, which are typically saved in ASCII, I don't know if those characters are available in ASCII, or more to the point whether the end developer will know/care how to get those symbols to appear in their source file.
  • We seem to be going against the most commonly defined standards already out there for controllers. I am going out on a limb here and saying even in Greece you won't find many/any controllers with Greek button names.
I'd prefer something based around numbers or letters or colours or primary shapes (or a combination). Just something, well, normal ;)
 
I'd prefer something based around numbers or letters or colours or primary shapes (or a combination). Just something, well, normal ;)
Shapes could work,   but as stated, there is an inherent ambiguity with using numbers or letters due to the fact that there are already buttons with those names. 

How about these:

♔♕♖♗♘♙

I think most people have enough familiarity with chess to recognise the King, Queen, Rook, Bishop, Knight and Pawn, and if need be you can refer to them by name instead of by symbol.

- Neelix
 
How about these:

♔♕♖♗♘♙

I think most people have enough familiarity with chess to recognise the King, Queen, Rook, Bishop, Knight and Pawn, and if need be you can refer to them by name instead of by symbol.
Pawn-Button ftw! ;)
 
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And what about sth like arrows?

Code:
    <>
  ^   ><
<   >
  v
 
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