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Sum02 Final Exam Review: Helping the Video Game Industry

The computer game and video game industry is enormous these days. EA realizes that there are two different potential markets for these games: The 12-18 year old market (low-budget, intense competition with movie industry), and the growing 25-40 year old market (can afford more expensive hardware). EA wants to know if they can have one user interface for both of these markets, or should they think about two user interfaces. How would you help them answer this question? What should they do before they start designing their user interface(s)?

Two user interfaces. Coding methods can be used to give a different look to each one, but still preserve functionality without needing to actually alter any backend code. However, I'd survey the target audience; get their opinion on what they want. This should be done before design occurs. Nigel O'Rear

Time passes, and now EA has some storyboards of the game and its interface. They want to know now, before they start coding and without spending too much money, if they're on the right path or have come up with a completely awful interface. What would you recommend they do and why?

Again, interview and survey the target audience. See what they think of the designs the team has settled on. Nigel O'Rear
Interviewing users is expensive. Is there any other way? Barbara Ericson
You could try cognitive walkthroughs... or a public beta test (which a lot of companies do, and get lots of things tested for free) luke
Questionnaires are cheap. You could perhaps include a screenshot of your interface design as well. Jim Gruen

EA is considering using a Model-View-Controller (MVC) structure for implementing the user interface for their new game. For example, if the user opens the Arkenchest, all the objects in the room touched by the evil ArkenLord should begin to glow. Trace out for EA the flow of messages in an MVC structure (assuming an object-oriented language, and that all objects in the visible world are View objects) between the user's opening the Arkenchest and the glowing of the objects.

Gonna do my best; not quite sure how to do this. Arkenchest's view is manipulated by the player. Update is sent to the view and all the views in the room. The models of the room's objects are asked to update. Within the individual models, a statement or a variable of some sort (previously set by another interaction via AI or by another player) that records ArkenLord interaction exists. The update methods for each model would return this information, which would then be displayed in the views. Nigel O'Rear

EA used Squeak for their implementation, especially for the multimedia and portability aspects. Now they're looking to optimize some features. For example, parsing the 3-D objects is taking too long. Name at least two things that EA could try in order to speed up their code.

Err....I have no idea. Help? Nigel O'Rear

it could be a problem of representation. if the 3d objects are defined by points in some kind of collection, using a different collection more suited to the manipulations at hand can make things run better.

the other alternative is to rewrite the methods to inline the types being used, so that runtime checking is avoided.

not really sure what 'parsing a 3d object' is supposed to mean, but just switch algorithms or change the language describing the object to be regular. most parsing algorithms can run in linear time this way. alan fay

What about tools in Squeak for figuring out what is taking a long time? Barbara Ericson

TimeProfileBrowser and MessageTally but they are inconsitant and give different answers each time they are used, so do we WANT to use them? luke
Yes they vary, but on the order of a couple of percentage points. It's like having the 4-hour ride home take 4 hours 17 minutes because your girfriend doesn't like marathon driving sessions. In other words, they're still useful. Just ron them several times to eliminate any oddities. Batman

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