Author Topic: Better Keyboard/Menu Navigation  (Read 1282 times)

murlough23

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Better Keyboard/Menu Navigation
« on: February 18, 2010, 04:37:15 pm »
Putting this under Feature Requests instead of Troubleshooting, because nothing here is truly buggy, but it's awfully awkward to use. I've found the song selection and options menus to be extremely sluggish to navigate, particularly in Fullscreen mode. Some specific nitpicks:

1) For some reason, Fullscreen slows my mouse down quite a bit when navigating the game menus, but NOT when playing the actual game. (Meaning I can surf just fine, but I overcompensate for a sluggish cursor and end up clicking on the wrong song or display option, etc.) This doesn't seem to happen in "windowed" mode, but then, when I need to register what blocks are what color and respond accordingly in a split second, I want those blocks to be as big as possible! (In other words, I don't want to play the game at any resolution other than Fullscreen.)

2) Due to the sluggishness of the mouse, I often resort to keyboard when trying to navigate through my music files and pick a song. For example, I'll hit "K" to jump to the folders in the list that start with K (since I have each artist in a separate folder), click on that folder, and then if there are multiple albums in that folder, I'll hit the first letter of the album title (since all of my mp3 files are named "Album Title - 01 - Song Title.mp3"). But for a letter with a lot of entries such as "S" or "M", I'll still have to scroll a bit to see them all on screen. It would be nice for keyboard navigation to work cumulatively, like it does in Windows' file menus - i.e. typing "MU" in rapid succession would make it much easier to get to "Muse", rather than "M" taking me to the first item under "M" and then "U" immediately jumping me to the U's.

3) Related to #2, I've also noticed that using the keyboard to navigate further up in a list (i.e. hitting "A" or even "Home" to try to return to the beginning of a file list) sometimes doesn't work at all. Again, this forces me to use the sluggish cursor to scroll back up. All letters should work. "Home" should return to the first file in the list. "End" should jump to the last. A functional "Page Up" and "Page Down" would be nice bonuses.

4) I'd honestly just use the external file browser to pick songs all the time (since the keyboard navigation works as expected there), except that doing this takes me out of Fullscreen mode. Windows is particularly slow about switching between the two modes, and it's annoying to change resolution back and forth every time I pick a new song. I realize it probably isn't possible to switch to another window that exists outside of Audiosurf while keeping Audiosurf fullscreened. But maybe this can be resolved by a "Maximize" command for Audiosurf that goes to the highest resolution that fits without truly going to Fullscreen? Then the other window popping up wouldn't reset the resolution.

Can any of these things be fixed? Pretty please?

lavacano201014

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Re: Better Keyboard/Menu Navigation
« Reply #1 on: February 18, 2010, 05:10:07 pm »
1) For some reason, Fullscreen slows my mouse down quite a bit when navigating the game menus, but NOT when playing the actual game. (Meaning I can surf just fine, but I overcompensate for a sluggish cursor and end up clicking on the wrong song or display option, etc.) This doesn't seem to happen in "windowed" mode, but then, when I need to register what blocks are what color and respond accordingly in a split second, I want those blocks to be as big as possible! (In other words, I don't want to play the game at any resolution other than Fullscreen.)

Does EVERYTHING lag, or JUST the mouse? If JUST the mouse, do you have one of those fanceh gaming mice with the kajillionn point accuracy, or whatever?

Green = listening, red = surfing

murlough23

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Re: Better Keyboard/Menu Navigation
« Reply #2 on: February 18, 2010, 05:11:58 pm »
Does EVERYTHING lag, or JUST the mouse? If JUST the mouse, do you have one of those fanceh gaming mice with the kajillionn point accuracy, or whatever?

Just the mouse, as far as I can tell, and only when navigating the menus. My mouse is pretty basic. It never gives me issues in other programs, or in "windowed" Audiosurf the few times I've played it that way.

0VERS33R

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Re: Better Keyboard/Menu Navigation
« Reply #3 on: February 18, 2010, 06:42:59 pm »
1) For some reason, Fullscreen slows my mouse down quite a bit when navigating the game menus, but NOT when playing the actual game. (Meaning I can surf just fine, but I overcompensate for a sluggish cursor and end up clicking on the wrong song or display option, etc.) This doesn't seem to happen in "windowed" mode, but then, when I need to register what blocks are what color and respond accordingly in a split second, I want those blocks to be as big as possible! (In other words, I don't want to play the game at any resolution other than Fullscreen.)

I've seen this issua a fair few times. Audiosurf, instead of compensating for the difference in screen resolution in it's game, keeps the EXACT SAME sensitivity, meaning that the ride in fullscreen will be different to the rid in windowed mode. I compensate through this by using a dual-sensitive mouse. Now, you say it's laggy? That is a problem. Try changing your sensitivity, see if that helps.

Otherwise I agree with you. These little configurations would be quite helpful. for point 4, yes, windows doesn't like switching to full screen mode. but alt+enter will do a quicker job switching between windowed and full-screen than destop to minimized full-screen application. I suggest having it windowed, selecting your song, once it's loaded, alt+enter. It should be significantly quicker.
Audiosurf is like a mix of tetris, need for speed and pot... Look at all the colours, dude!

blue_h3x

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Re: Better Keyboard/Menu Navigation
« Reply #4 on: February 19, 2010, 02:17:20 am »
Point #2 gets my +1

For selecting songs, check out YAAP (yet another audiosurf player), you can build a playlist or play one song at a time, and you can set it to change AS to fullscreen when you start a song.
Austria is just like Yorkshire, but they have bigger hills.... oh and they have real snow too

lavacano201014

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Re: Better Keyboard/Menu Navigation
« Reply #5 on: February 19, 2010, 06:41:38 am »
I don't think Point Dos would be too hard to get going. Store each typed character in a string, with each change, start navigating to it, and after one or two seconds of clearing, blank the string for later use.

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murlough23

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Re: Better Keyboard/Menu Navigation
« Reply #6 on: February 27, 2010, 12:30:06 pm »
This may or may not be related. I noticed yesterday that letters typed in when attempt to navigate my music folders via keyboard were also registering in the comments box. I don't know if this was only because I had left the score menu on the "Comments" tab when clicking "Continue", or if it always happens, but it might help explain why keystrokes sometimes aren't being registered where they ought to.

Ironically, when I noticed this, the last four artists I had played songs by were Lifehouse, Anathallo, Radiohead, and KT Tunstall, so the stray letters that ended up in the comments box spelled "lark". This was amusing to me, since the KT Tunstall song I had just played was called "White Bird".

0VERS33R

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Re: Better Keyboard/Menu Navigation
« Reply #7 on: February 27, 2010, 03:15:27 pm »
lol That's funny! I think i'm even gunna check it out.
Audiosurf is like a mix of tetris, need for speed and pot... Look at all the colours, dude!

blue_h3x

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Re: Better Keyboard/Menu Navigation
« Reply #8 on: February 27, 2010, 04:20:04 pm »
haha! how odd
Austria is just like Yorkshire, but they have bigger hills.... oh and they have real snow too

Cadiuro

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Re: Better Keyboard/Menu Navigation
« Reply #9 on: March 04, 2010, 01:19:10 pm »
Also quite related, some kind of navigation bug.

I've got for example a lot of songs starting with "T" (The Wine Song, The Car Song, Tausend Sterne, you see what I mean). When the first song starting with T is at the top of my list, the last is not visible and I shall thus have to scroll down.

So far no problem.

When I open my list (and thus the songs starting with numbers will be at the top) and I press "T" on my keyboard, the list will jump to the songs starting with T. Still no problem. If I immediatly scroll using my scrollwheel, the list will jump back to the beginning.

I found out that if I press T and click the scroll-block at the right side for only a short moment, I can scroll with my scrollwheel without any problems from where I was.

blue_h3x

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Re: Better Keyboard/Menu Navigation
« Reply #10 on: March 04, 2010, 02:54:25 pm »
I've seen this happen as well.
Austria is just like Yorkshire, but they have bigger hills.... oh and they have real snow too

0VERS33R

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Re: Better Keyboard/Menu Navigation
« Reply #11 on: March 04, 2010, 07:00:58 pm »
I have a total of about 5 songs (not literally) so I don't need to use the keyboard the find songs. When I do, however, I don't seem to get the problem. Actually, I've never had a problem with the programming of Audiosurf!
Audiosurf is like a mix of tetris, need for speed and pot... Look at all the colours, dude!