The "Problomatic" Puzle

As Mike has already said the puzzle proved to much trouble to put in the finished patch, as we realised a more simplistic working patch is better than a non working "technical showpiece". however here is a couple of screen dumps showing how much jitter processing was involved in it, hence the reason it slowed down the entire patch. with a little more time i think we could of solved it. but in the end it was sensible to leave it out.

Redone Videos

These are the finshed videos we have used in the patch...they are much cut down and simplified versions of the orignal files, as we felt there was far too much information on the screen...as we had text in three different places. despite being mixed to a relatively low resolution, max sometimes still struggles to play the files. however it does eventually sort itself out.

Update - Mike Kilby

I spent all of Wed night and Thursday trying to fix Dave's puzzle patch to work with mine. There was an unforseen problem in slotting Dave's patch into the quiz patch, as the quiz pztch chose random questions and answers based on charm name/index, whereas Dave's patch just had a random nuber generator (1 - 4). There were other problems too using the xfade object, this just didn't work properly, despite working with the other videos in the charm patch, I still haven't worked out why. We also found that the puzzle was taking some time to load as the image was being broken up into 144 tiles and randomised, so this was inevitable really.

Anyway, in the end I just removed the patch and we've decided to keep it simple with a basic quiz. I also removed the instructions page and added large & legible instructions to the interface so the user can follow the steps as they go along, rather than reading it all at the start then trying to remember it!

Mike C's audio stuff now works very well too after some de-bugging on mine & Mike C's part.

We got some really helpful feedback from Rob on Friday about the audio and text. Ash is working again on cutting down text and sorting out a voiceover for the opening patch. Mike C is adding some more sounds to the quiz patch, and finding some audio to add to the background for the home page and charms page.

New Text & Charms Video By Ashley Bennett

This week I took on board what advice the rotunda museum staff had to offer and began working on a refined version of the text.

The old version of the text was bulky and contained words to difficult for young people to read so these needed to be replaced.

This week was really a means of ironing out bugs in the patch which the two Mike's did a great job of. Due to this we found out that some things worked & others didn't.

One thing that didn't work was the instructions window which we ended up replacing for a short video of the Charms.





This is the video that replaced the instructions text.

Feedback - Mike Kilby

Bit gutted that our patch didn't load properly on Rob's laptop, but we found afterwards that our patch loaded fine on 3 other computers so I'm thinking maybe Rob hasn't got the Quicktime software required to load portable network graphics files into the Max pict.ctrl objects...

Anyway, we've listened to the feeedback on what we did manage to show the museum staff, and we're going to make the following changes to our patch:

1) A better defined colour scheme - the red background looks nice but gives no imporession of good catch so we're going to use the Quiz background image. We've already done this and there's some things that don't look quite right so this might need some adjustments.

2) Simpler text - this was the most emphasised problem, that the text on the charms was way too long and had some big words in that kids might not understand, the same goes for some of the quiz questions/answers. Ash is working on getting this fixed.

3) Voiceovers - These were also quite long with some big words again (one or two of which were mispronounced), so Ash is going to re-record them this week.

4) Video/image copyrights. Dave is working on getting some other footage as we've looked at the BBC policies and they're not too kind! It shouldn't be too much work as two of the videos are compiled mainly with royalty-free images anyway.

That's it in terms of feedback, but there are a few little bugs that me and Mike C are working on getting ironed out. We want to go in towards the end of this week to test our patch works properly with the Lemur.

Max Logic (Quiz, charms page & fades) - Mike Kilby

Just thought I'd write a bit about the other visual aspects and some other concepts that I maybe should have explained earlier on! (oops)

As a group we've decided that the best way to give the user a feeling of accomplishment is to have a visual indication of how well they are doing in the quiz. We decided this should be in the form of a boat moving across the bottom of the screen. After searching hard for a way to do this with jitter I ended up going the slider route instead.


Over the last 4 days I've been working on the quiz patch and I have accomplished the logic behind the quiz by loading .txt files into coll objects and then selecting questions/answers from those coll objects by charm type and a random number between 1 & 4 (as there are 4 questions for each charm).

The first image here shows the randomiser patch.









This image shows the coll objects with randmoiser inputs. The outputs from these patches go to message boxes which are displayed on the quiz UI.






I was going to take the above approach for the charms page too, but it wasn't really necessary as there were only 4 sets of texts (one for each charm) and I wanted to use a fade effect too so I used comment boxes instead. I was able to alter the alpha channel using a line object to fade the text in and out. I wanted to do the same for the images/videos too but it wasn't quite so simple. I've had to use the jit.xfade object to merge (crossfade) between the 4 charms videos. \the videos are loaded in automatically with a loadbang and the name of the file (e.g. seahorse.mov).

More Interface - Mike Kilby

Just to show some further development of the interface. I'm having real problems with getting a .txt file to load into the comment box whilst preserving line breaks and punctuation, so I think I'm going to have to load in 4 text boxes and use the alpha channel to fade them in and out.

I've asked Ash if he could do some more simplified text as there's too much at the moment. Looking forward to getting all of the audio, video and interface pulled together tomorrow. Fingers crossed!