Player: User Feedback / PPC Interface Comments

[+Mr Emu]

Hi everyone,

 

I recently created the first Australian Wherigo geocache - "Flight of Fancy", (code 41 if you want to "emulate" it) - and subsequently bought a Bluetooth GPSr (Holux M-1200) to "test drive" my creation with a work-provided "HTC Touch Dual" (Windows Mobile 6) phone. Having run the cartridge in the emulator many dozens of times during the development phase, I was excited to see how the experience would play out on location. I used the Player Version: 2.0.5018.3584 (4/18/2008), and the cartridge was created with Builder Version: 2.0.5018.3550 (4/18/2008). Here are some of the "issues" from my first Wherigo experience. I hope that other builders - or the developers - might find it useful (or be able to set me straight).

 

Related to Cartridge design (i.e. my fault):

Although I had made the zones 66ft/20m square, I seemed to be "wandering" all over the place in this lightly-treed park - regularly putting me outside of zones - even when I was standing still in the middle of the target area*. The only finder of the cache so far reported this, and that was the major reason for my investment/test drive.

*(The original waypoints were measured with a Garmin 60CSx - using averaging, with a maximum error of 10ft/3m.)

 

Maybe it would work better in an open field, and perhaps a Garmin Colorado would have given a better lock, but it certainly changed some thoughts I had about creating a grid-based "Play Anywhere" cartridge to suit a limited field size (e.g. football field).

 

Related to the Wherigo Player (or is it the HTC Touch Dual?):

1. On the main screen it is possible to navigate between "Locations", "You See", "Inventory" and "Tasks" using the directional buttons on the Pocket PC, but pressing the OKAY/ENTER button on the PPC doesn't open the sub-level - you have to touch the item on the screen. The same thing happens at the sub-levels corresponding to the menu items listed above, and also on the "Select a Cartridge" page.

2a. The OKAY/ENTER button on the PPC works when there is a single "action" for a Character or Item, but not if there are multiple choices (e.g. Take, Examine, Use).

2b. Unlike the menus, you can't use the directional buttons to scroll between actions.

3. The directional buttons can't be used to scroll when the text goes off the bottom of the page.

 

Perhaps the three points above are not major issues, but minor annoyances. However I found out in a practical way that navigating the Wherigo cartridge on the PPC (no pun intended), would be easier if it could mostly be driven by the directional & ENTER buttons. If anyone thinks the problems are touch-device specific, I'd be interested to hear about it.

 

I haven't seen a Colorado in action yet - perhaps the buttons/navigation looks & works better on that platform. However, the Colorado will remain a specialty item for many for some time to come. After all, what proportion of geocachers have the "old", cheaper 60CSx? My view is that growth of Wherigo could explode when anybody with one of the increasingly-widespread GPSr-enabled Smartphones could "play". It would be well worth the effort to make sure this platform plays nicely.

 

Regards,

Peter

[+TheHarvesters]

Hi, could someone please confirm for me:

 

in the above post it seemed that one fault of the player on a pocket PC was that text in longer messages could not be scrolled through.

 

Is this still a problem? Does it affect all Pocket PCs? Is there any way around it? Other than to have the messages shrunk in the cartridge?

 

If there is a finite length to messages for pocket PC's what is the longest length? and is this dependant upon any image that might be shown to accompany the text?

 

I don't own a pocket PC so I cannot test this for myself. Obviously I'd like to make my cartrdige as open as possible.

 

thanks Paul.

[+dfx]

the above post doesnt say that you can't scroll through longer texts - it says you can't scroll through them using the buttons on the device, but rather have to use the touchscreen to do that.

 

i didn't confirm this on my own PPC, but it doesn't surprise me and is very likely a problem of the Wherigo player. the GS Wherigo player has a lot of issues and nobody seems to care enough to fix them (or release the source code). my biggest beef with the player is that it's only geared towards devices with 320x240 screen resolution and so it will look really ugly when used on other devices (such as my PPC, which has 640x480 resolution), making some features of it totally unusable, most notably the distance/direction display to the zone you're navigating to, as half of the line of the text is missing.