Re: On streamling of gnome games

[Mario Wenzel <maweki gmail com>]

"We should probably not completely take away the
player's ability to choose his own difficulty level."

You're absolutely right and that is why I didn't suggest that. There would always just be an additional difficulty level (that is default) that determines (through statistical means) a difficulty level that seems proper and chooses that one. We could also employ a non-interactive hint that tells about that very friendlyly (as I said before).

Looking at the GNU Chess there's no way to set Difficulty on a 1,2,3-Level (there are a multitude of settings that determine the strength of the AI). So in general, our levels are already arbitrary (this would by supported by a glance over the engine.conf file of gnome-chess). I would guess that most people don't know how to rate themselves against our AIs (I certainly don't).

I truly believe that the common user during his whole time with the game, from beginner to mastery (or even having a buddy over to play with), should not need to open the options menu because the experience is always satisfying.

I think we are in a position that we can make guesses and sense behaviour and strength.

On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 1:19 AM, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org> wrote:

On Mon, 2014-03-24 at 21:07 +0100, Mario Wenzel wrote:
> To recap: We should take a good look again at our games roadmap and
> think about whether New Game Screens are really necessary. We should
> include adaptive difficulty wherever possible and remove (explicit)
> settings in cases where we conceivably could sense usage patterns. We
> should remove fundamental settings that impact the playability (not
> difficulty but for example whether we have a human opponent, be it
> local or remote) from options menu and put that somewhere sensible (I
> suggest a second “New Game”-Button or overloading the existing one
> with a popover).

Right now the only games with new game screens are Mines and Sudoku. I
do agree with your concern about having an extra screen. We have an open
bug report in Mines from a player who wants to skip the new game screen.
Still, it's a better place than the preferences dialog for selecting
your opponent.

I guess adaptive difficulty would be one way of avoiding the issue. I'm
not very passionate about this, since I also think normal difficulty
levels are fine, too. We should probably not completely take away the
player's ability to choose his own difficulty level.