I think the CLICK is too powerful...

[PyTom]

Rollback is good, but it is only mitigation, and there are still cases where it would be a frustrating option -- for example, in the case of a 30 second animation where the player only accidentally skipped the last 5 seconds, the rollback approach still presumably means the player will be forced to sit through the first 25 seconds again. (He may then be very frustrated to discover that he'd only missed 5 seconds of the animation anyway.)

The question, though, is how likely is this. When I accidentally click, it's almost always immediately (think, < 250ms) after a prior click... because my finger accidentally twitched after the first click. I can't think of many cases where one would accidentally click 25,000ms into a cutscene... without it being an intentional attempt to abort the cutscene.

I'm not sure that accidental skipping is really the problem we're addressing here. (Accidental skipping is one of the cases rollback was intended to prevent.)

The real problem is, I think, intentional skippping. My position on this is that if the user has gone out of his way to express that he wants to advance the story, then the game should respect the user by doing what he wants. I don't like software that second guesses me, and I see this as the equivalent of disabling the fast-forward button on a remote. (Or making the user tap the button on the remote multiple times before it responds... I'd see that as hardware failure.)

If anything, the changes I see in this area would be to make it easier to skip a cutscene as a unit, rather then having to skip each element that makes it up one at a time. (Perhaps the way of doing it is to say that skipping a transition skips all transitions until the next non-transition interaction. Couple this with a Pause transition, and we could write something like:

Code: Select all

show eileen at offscreenright
with None
show eileen at left 
with move
with Pause(1)
show eileen at right
with move

e "There... and back again!"

And have clicking anywhere during the sequence bring us to the end.

[Jake]

The question, though, is how likely is this. When I accidentally click, it's almost always immediately (think, < 250ms) after a prior click... because my finger accidentally twitched after the first click. I can't think of many cases where one would accidentally click 25,000ms into a cutscene... without it being an intentional attempt to abort the cutscene.

Hmm... I quite frequently accidentally click my mouse in the middle of reading something or waiting for something; I suspect it might be something to do with being left-handed, but having one of those contoured mice that only fit dexter hands. Before I switched to using a tablet at work I was finding myself accidentally opening context menus and switching to background windows while reading documents all the time.