If Transitions are this broken...what are YOU using?

Q&A about the latest versions
Branigan
Posts: 231
Joined: Tue May 19, 2020 3:43 pm

Neal wrote: Sun Aug 23, 2020 10:19 pm I should have been more specific. The compression and the pagespeed mod are both on your server. They communicate with the browser via headers and do several things, including dramatically improving downloading speed, improving website performance, and reducing RAM requirements. You can determine if a site is using them by looking at the headers for the index.html file.
No, I understand, and thanks for the suggestions, but I'm not doing any of that. I can't ask clients who are hosting things - when I'm not directly myself - to optimise their servers or have them have their IT guys do the same and/or imply they're not already doing it well enough. It's my responsibility to simply provide as slim and efficient a package, requiring as few resources as possible, to run on anything. They can have their server configured like crap and their viewers also have bad connections and ratty hardware and it will still work well if the data throughput is small. I fix the things I can and don't worry about those I can't.

BTW, maybe put Metareal on the back burner for now. I broke it almost immediately constructing a 5 pano 1 bedroom ground floor flat. Kitchen, Bathroom, Lounge, Bedroom, Garden. I had Kitchen, Lounge, Bathroom linked, then added Garden, which would not link at all. Eventually it did on recreating the Garden cube 3 times, then Kitchen to Bathroom stopped working, although I'd not touched either. Doors changed what they were connected to, wouldn't navigate to what they'd changed to and also wouldn't navigate to what they were corrected back to. There weren't even that many doors... Also impossible to link Lounge to Bedroom. At all. Deleted and remade 'faulty' rooms several times, even just making a simple cube for them and no other details: nada. It's in 'very long' beta, but clearly not tested by people who know how to report and/or fix bugs on the most basic of attempts to use the software... :(

I do like using it though, and before I broke it the Transitions looked great; even with basically a Box for each room and a few cubes for a sofa and a table, kitchen island etc. The doll's house had black areas on the sides of the furniture boxes where there was no actual data to fill in the backs of their cubes, so it's less clean looking and impressive than if you take lots of panos per room to fill them in, but still looked better than nothing - this was before I removed all that to try and get the rooms to link. If you're just conveying the layout and want the floorplan then you could drop the Doll's house and don't bother adding furniture details, as simple cube rooms looked better in some ways and the smearing of the textures from room to room when travelling was still much better than a cross dissolve.
Jmondo
Posts: 73
Joined: Thu Nov 16, 2017 11:10 am

Neal and Branigan, I’m enjoying your back and forth, and learning a lot (that I need to learn a lot). Can you each send examples of your tours? Would love to see how they load and perform. I’m in the process of trying to improve my load times, want to see what’s possible.

Thanks!
Jesse
Neal
Posts: 193
Joined: Thu Dec 12, 2013 11:14 am
Contact:

Jmondo wrote: Mon Aug 24, 2020 1:04 am Neal and Branigan, I’m enjoying your back and forth, and learning a lot (that I need to learn a lot). Can you each send examples of your tours? Would love to see how they load and perform. I’m in the process of trying to improve my load times, want to see what’s possible.

Thanks!
Jesse
Sure: https://hvolnew.com/Images/20057504/index.html
Branigan
Posts: 231
Joined: Tue May 19, 2020 3:43 pm

Neal wrote: Mon Aug 24, 2020 4:10 am
Jmondo wrote: Mon Aug 24, 2020 1:04 am Neal and Branigan, I’m enjoying your back and forth, and learning a lot (that I need to learn a lot). Can you each send examples of your tours? Would love to see how they load and perform. I’m in the process of trying to improve my load times, want to see what’s possible.

Thanks!
Jesse
Sure: https://hvolnew.com/Images/20057504/index.html
I'll pass on putting up my examples for dissection, for the reasons below... ;)

Nice looking tour and great music, :) although after it had restarted for the second time I was looking for the off button. Don't make me use my own volume control and then have it too low for everything else.

The initial tour took a long time to load; there was a skeleton of an empty skin for over a minute, which didn't seem to want to get filled, but after a URL refresh it was populated quite quickly.

I liked the responsive Floorplan with the text changing from Basement to B etc. when I changed desktop browser size; but when it moves to the top on a mobile, the location name, autorotation and compass buttons get cropped off the right side.

Text 'Ricky Ing' was cropped halfway through in the front logo/circle start tour button on mobile and the very bottom of the 'g' was trimmed on desktop (Firefox both times)

*Dining Room

That's a pretty large Nadir logo; your tripod and hairy legs don't look that large in the reflection in the Basement NE Corner :D

None of the pictures on any of the walls loaded for me on desktop. Just a spinning circle and an X in the top right corner. But they did load - and were quite small - on mobile, with the (X) quite a long way from them.

Firefox popped up a warning triangle notification on the URL bar that the images were from an insecure connection (no Security certificate for their address?), which is maybe why they didn't load on desktop. Why it let them load on the mobile is something I'll look into with the security settings on my phone.

The music took a *very long time to start on the mobile, I was halfway through the house before it started playing. It made me jump because I had initially thought you didn't load it on the mobile to reduce data downloads and my volume was set quite high. :)

The text and titles in the dropdown info boxes is very small on mobile, needs to be 2 or 3 times larger to be readable and the navigation buttons at the bottom are too close together for my fingers and not central - which when I go back and check, is also the case on the desktop. OCD trigger alert... ;) This is on a Redmi Note 8 Pro with a 6.53" screen, so harder still on an Apple 5.5" screen?

You could probably drop the single <- which pops out the U/D/L/R navigation buttons. If people find them, then they've already worked out how to get around and it looks a little lost sitting on its own.

If you type the URL without the index.html (which shouldn't really be needed) you get an empty directory listing and your server info.
Branigan
Posts: 231
Joined: Tue May 19, 2020 3:43 pm

Maybe Metareal is back in the running again. ;)

Support came back very quickly with some suggestions and acknowledgements of issues that they're looking at; like outdoors needing a cube to work rather than a floating orb - as Matterport offers - and door naming and selection fiddlyness. Navigation links can be overridden in the Nav View to teleport from anywhere to anywhere that's not line of sight.

Got it working and added in the some rough furniture cubes for the doll's house pretty quickly and here's a little tour of a flat that sold a few months ago.

https://tour-eu.metareal.com/apps/playe ... 8f8135de15

It's a little trippy flying through the wall from the Lounge to the Bedroom, :) but I prefer it to the 'Teleport', which is just a Cross Dissolve I'd likely use for greater distances and anyway, it's exactly what I'd use in Pano2VR (Pro) if it existed: Zooming Leave, Dissolving into a Zoom Arrival.
Jmondo
Posts: 73
Joined: Thu Nov 16, 2017 11:10 am

Come on Branigan, be brave. This is a safe space for self improvement :). Share a link, especially if you offer critique of others.

Neal, great site. It definitely seems geared more for desktop - it's a much cleaner experience than mobile. My guess is that you know your intended audience, and perhaps mobile is not as important for you in your market. As a result, I hesitate to give feedback on the mobile experience if it's an afterthought for you. If you would like some mobile feedback, let me know.

Load time is great on desktop. It took a little longer to load on mobile, but still pretty good considering you have 30 panos in there.

I do agree that it would be nice to be able to kill the music. One other consideration...The room label tab in the top left has a dropdown arrow, but the info in the dropdown is general to the home, not the room. Because the arrow shares the space with the room name, the intuitive assumption is that you would be describing the room. If you want to keep this description general info, I would suggest separating the arrow from the room visually, or remove it in that location altogether. You provide the same info in the "i" circle icon at the bottom, which is a more intuitive placement for general info.

Here's one of my tours. I welcome critique, but please keep it to the skin. I'm aware that the panos themselves could be improved and that I don't have the nadir removed. This tour has my most recent skin updates, but the job itself was fast and furious so the panos suffered. I'm also aware that the gyro on mobile is a jittery mess, but I'm not quite ready to give up on it. I have faith that the developers will fix the gyro problems that have been well documented in this forum over the past few months:

https://the360listing.com/apt5g/

Best,
Jesse
Post Reply