Hi everyone,

It's been two months since the last update about AAO6, and it's high time to give you a little more to toy with while waiting for the big fish to come out.
That's why today I'm releasing the "almost complete" AAO6 player preview !

Contrary to the version from two months ago which was very limited, this version should now be able to read most existing trials, since it includes support for health management, court records, checking evidence, cross-examinations, investigations, psyche-locks gameplay (though not the graphics : the locks themselves won't show up yet) and most player input actions.

This V6 player preview also introduces an important new feature for case authors : the AAO live debugger, which enables you to monitor and edit the status of your trial as you play through. This includes setting the value of variables and toggling the visibility of CR elements, investigation scenes, talk conversations and frames. It should come in handy when you need to test a specific situation in your trial...

There are still a few things missing at the moment, so please don't complain about these specific problems :

• The psyche-locks won't actually show up, though you can play psyche locks sequences fine.
• The "Ask player to input a variable's value" action is not implemented yet.
• The "Display evidence on screen" action doesn't display anything yet.
• The evidence check button cannot load mp3s yet, it only works with text and pictures.
• The End game action is not implemented yet, so you cannot move between different parts of a series yet.

Now, onto the serious thing : how to try it ?

You can load any trial using the following address

where <Trial_ID> is the ID number of your trial.
For those who don't know, the ID number is the one that can be found at the end of the address you put in links to your trial, which looks like jeu.php?id_proces=<Trial_ID>.

An example of a valid link is loading Turnabout Nightmare on AAO6

If you wish to try the live debugger, you should append &debug to the address, like this :

Note that the debugger is only available for a trial's authors.


As usual, I'm waiting for your feedback, be it criticism or praise of the new interface, or even bug reports.
Please post your feedback in this topic : this is what will help me make AAO6 even better !

Enjoy !

-No quick-display?
-It would be nice if there were a way to keep evidence info displayed
-Text that fit the v5 check box nicely looks pretty weird in the v6 check.
-There seems to be some weird stuff with frames that are both merged and timed
-Not sure exactly what it is, but it seems that the textbox (or at least the area the text is in) is slightly smaller in v6. There are certain lines that are 3 lines in v5 but 4 in v6.
-Shake effects still cause my browser to freeze (only the first time, though)
-I think it'd be more intuitive if just pressing down the button cause it to fast-forward (that is, if you didn't have to release it)
-It seems that the title gets cut off if it's too long (at the top of the page)
-Text blips seem kinda loud to me
-It'd be nice if we could press+present while the text was still displaying
-The "Press" and "Present" text just... don't sit right in their buttons imo. Hmm...
-In merged frames, you can't fast-forward until the last frame
-It seems that <white> color tags don't work... (I'll get something like a red "<span style="color: white">[text]</span>" instead)
-When you present at a testimony, I think you should be able to just click the evidence, instead of having to hit that "select" button (...and same for when you present outside a testimony xP)
-If you hit 'present' and then 'back', it's be nice if it didn't cause the text to re-display
-When you need to present to an area of a photo, I think you should get rid of those grey bars on the top+bottom. The image should already be 256x192; those bars just mess it up and make it look weird.
-The "Oh no!" sfx might not work... There could've been some other reason it didn't work, tho. Hm.
-Even if you select for only Profiles or Evidence to be able to be presented, but evidence and profiles can be presented (....No wait, the select buttons....... Hm. It seems kinda unintuitive to me.)
-I don't know what it was, but I had a merged frame where the first frame just didn't play at all o.O
-The desk slam sfx doesn't seem to work either...
-After a frame finished, the textbox just disappeared, and was waiting for me to click the button to advance. Not sure what caused it... My best guess is because there was a [#s] tag at the very end of the frame.
-It seems like there's a slight delay before start-up sprites play (and either the still or talk sprite shows in the meanwhile; can't really tell which one)
-If seems that even if a textbox is just "[#f]" or "[#s]" there will be text blips.
-Hidden merged frames also don't really work so well
-Backgrounds and stuff load much quicker, it seems :3 (like, no black background for a moment when you first display a background) yay~
-If you have a check open during a merged frame, it closes when it proceeds to the next part of the merged frame
-There can be quite a long delay when a sound plays the first time...
-It seems the Hide Character function doesn't work... (which is weird, since I'm sure this isn't the first time in the trial there's been a Hide Character, but it just failed twice in a row, so .__.)
-When you set the lifebar flash to 0, the flash disappears from left to right, and it looks kinda weird.... (Although iirc you said you'd add a "stop flash" action, and if that just stops it straight, I think that'll be fine~)
-For a multiple-choice question, if the answer is too long, the text just keeps going and gets cut off =\
-The not-talking AJ court overview background doesn't seem to work
-Occasionally, I'd get a weird glitch where a frame would use the proper still sprite, but the speaking sprite of the previous frame
-...No way to save yet?
-All of a sudden, the music just stopped... (I think it might have to do with (you guessed it!) merged frames ^^' It was in a frame and was merged to the next one, which had the actual text and also a sfx)
-In debug mode, what exactly is Frame# and Frame Index...? Also, what does "Watch another frame" do?
-I don't know if it's a problem with evaluating conditions (that is, it goes to the success frame even when it fails) or with the random function; it seems like it went to the first penalty convo a lot, the second a little, and the third none at all (about 2/3, 1/3, and 0/3 of the time)
-Music seems to just fail to play sometimes...
-The Shouting sfx doesn't seem to work either
-Would it be possible to make the evidence graphics slightly narrower? I think it'd look better if there were 3 in each row instead of 2...
-I haven't been sure, but... yeah. There's definitely random lag in the sound. It's usually pretty minor so it sounds kinda funny but you're not sure if anything really happened or not, but I just had a big spike. It especially happens during sfx
-Turns out it's color tags in general that don't work, not just white tags.
-Yeah... It seems that Evaluate Condition goes to the success frame even if it fails
-Benches don't shake... and it looks a bit strange to me
-Sometimes the text blips end a bit too early...
-From the looks of debug mode, it looks like increasing a variable by defining it as [variable]+X doesn't work...


And.... yeah. That's it. This is lookin' pretty awesome, Unas. Can't wait for the final version!! ^_^

Totally.
Also the little "Select" button is a bit small when you have to present an evidence, and since it's down the evidence window if you miss it you have to put the mouse on the piece evidence again.

This looks amazing, althought I now meet a variation of "infinite typing sound" problem, when switching to another tab the sound plays to the normal lenght, but the real typing pauses, and thus when I go back to the trial's tab the text finishes displaying, mute.

Thanks for the feedback (and thanks Kroki for writing the French announcement, I was too tired yesterday evening ^^)

BP, about some of the points you're adressing.

Indeed, there's some more stuff that isn't implemented yet that I forgot to mention. That includes
- No instant text display yet.
- No game saves yet
- No preloading of sounds (which is why you can have some lag the first time a sound is played)



It was my first idea when making the new evidence panel, but having the description for all evidence displayed at all times made the page feel really overloaded, so I decided against it.
Note that the green panel for metadata is empty for old trials, but should contain some information visible at all times in V6 trials.


True, I'll have to turn their volume down a little.


There are several problems with this.
For example if, while in present mode, you want to use the check button : you have to click the check button, which is inside the evidence box... and therefore selects the evidence for presenting ?
Having a select button is less confusing, I think.
Though Kroki is right, I should probably make it bigger.


I understand it can look a little weird, but where then should I put the back button ?
In the real games, these bars with the present and back buttons are displayed over the picture, making parts of it unreachable. In AAO, I want the whole picture to be reachable, so I add these bars around rather than over.


True, I'm aware of these bugs. I'll have to do something about that, I guess

About all other bugs, (pictures that don't appear, merged frames that don't play correctly, colour tags that aren't converted properly, evaluating conditions, etc.) please give me precise references to the frames where it fails so I can investigate.
For example, in theory <white> tags should be converted to AAO6 tags when importing - if it doesn't, then I need to look at your trial to know what failed in the conversion process.


Frame ID# is the frame ID you've always known.
Frame Index is the position of the frame in the trial.
This is because in AAO6 the reordering of frame IDs isn't automatic, so you could have frame with ID 123 as your first frame (so having index 1).
The Frames panel in the debugger lets you toggle the visibility of individual frames, but I couldn't really put a list of all frames there... So it only displays "watched frames". When a frame's status changes, it's automatically watched; you can use the "Watch another frame" button to manually add a frame to this list and control its visibility.


It's not meant to : the debugger only takes literal values. After all, since you can see everything about the player's status, you can compute whatever you want yourself
Though it might be helpful indeed if I added the ability to compute expressions to set the value.


I know about that. I'm not sure I can do much about that, though... As far as I'm concerned, I'm not "detecting" that you are on another tab at all : it's the web browser that seems to put part of the script on hold while ou look away. I'm not sure I can influence that...

About this:

I was thinking about something like "You click on the piece of evidence and the informations slide and display below".
However this might cause another problem, displaying a piece of evidence would make every other ones below move, which might not look very handsome...?

You can. I keep telling you about this, but you always forget. Use the Page Visibility API.
https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webperf/raw-file ... rview.html
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Perfo ... fault.html

When you detect that the page isn't visible, pause everything.

"Pausing everything" is easier said than done, it requires important changes to the design of the system. You don't "pause" a program, you have to store its status, stop it, and when needed restore the status and start again.
Text typing works with a sequence of successive timers, each run sending its current state information to the next timer. If I just stop the chain, I lose that status information, unless I store it somewhere, then I have to make it possible to reenter the typing process with that current status instead of typing from the start, etc...

Anyway, it's possible, and not really hard, but it's a mess. The only thing I'd easily consider with page visibility is muting the sound when the tab isn't visible - at least you wouldn't have the sound of the text typing while you're doing something else - but I guess some people might like listening to music while they're watching something else.


No, what I would love would be a way to tell the browser NOT to slow down JS timers on the player, but there isn't. -_-

EDIT : Kroki do you mean presenting the CR as it is now, but opening the description on click rather than on hover ?
It's an idea, but it would make selecting evidence to present yet one more click away

That's my idea indeed. Sure it adds a click, but the current hover system makes it hard to read the description, you have to stay on the little pannel and if you move too fast the mouse you have to come back. I think it's equaly problematic.

That would be selfish, though. Users could be running many Web apps at the same time in different tabs. But muting the audio is a good idea.

They're also considering making tabs behave like mobile apps where they are completely suspended when inactive.


I think that's good reasoning. Plus, using clicks will improve the experience on touchscreens. I think it would be easier to understand.

Yeah, but usually age+gender/type+location found is in that box, right? It's not the most important info
I was thinking of something like Kroki, where clicking opens and closes the evidence. But what if there was a compromise? Hovering the mouse over the evidence displays it, and then clicking it will cause the evidence to remain open (or close it if it's already open). This way you don't need to add clicks if you're just glancing at evidence, but you can keep evidence open if you want.


...*owned-sfx*
Okay, how about this: What if clicking the evidence pic/green box also selected the evidence? It'd be quicker than hitting the select button, intuitive, and wouldn't interfere with the Check button.

I like this idea of "pinning" evidence. I'll think about it


It's the "intuitive" part I'm not so sure of, unless we can make it really obvious that these areas are clickable.
In fact, it also has the same problem that you mentionned earlier : when the present action is locked on a type, how do we know whether an element can be presented or not ? Currently, elements that can be presented have a select button, others don't. If we remove the select button entirely and rely on clicking on the icon, how do we make such a difference ?

Well, if you went to click on the evidence, you'd click on the pic/green box, wouldn't you?
Anyway, could you lock the player into the evidence/profile section, like it's done now?
Honestly, I don't think the way it's done now is very intuitive; I'd probably think it was a glitch that caused the "Select" button to not show up, rather than only evidence/profiles being able to be presented.

Maybe we should do this: when the user is asked to present evidence, a box appears in the lower screen that says "Select an item from the Court Record" with an arrow pointing to the right. We could also make the court record flash -- or something similar -- to focus the user's attention on it.

Yeah, I was thinking about that too. And this text could make it clear if there is a restriction (Select a profile, Select a piece of evidence, ...)
Still, currently CR elements do not look like interactive elements. Meph, do you think you could provide a mockup for that ?

OK. I'll work on it tomorrow.