It's been a while and then I see that V7 Beta is out and there are new Tutorials.
Upgrade cost is €100, so I'm just wondering if some of the issues I had with V6 are now resolved to convince me I need the upgrade.I skimmed the new videos and it all looks great with unfolding lines etc. on info boxes etc. and automated this and that, but from what I can see V7 has a lot of mainly desktop-centric tour features/improvements.
As I can't use most of those on mobile, tablet or touchscreens - I can't even have location names pop up on navigation icons, especially not below them on the screen, as that's where your finger is - I have to stick to features that work on everything; and so I'm more interested in any navigation improvements.
As you'll recall the main issues I had were:
1) the FoV Mode defaults to Vertical (i.e. a 9:16 mobile screen held upright) and it seems everyone leaves it like that for creating Desktop (16:9) tours. As this FoV then crops in the sides too much when displayed on 9:16 mobile or 4:3 tablets, I set it to Diagonal FoV where it does adjust the window accordingly. This was fine. We all then discovered that much of the maths didn't expect anyone to do this and Transitions didn't work properly and were too fast/slow or went too far/not far enough. This was apparently a complicated thing to fix and while it was it said it was possibly going to happen in a v6 update about a year(? more?) ago, it would definitely (?) happen in v7.
There was a fairly late minor update to Transitions to attempt to improve the Zoom range, which apparently did something for 'Vertical FoV', but because of the 'hard-wired' maths it did nothing for Diagonal FoV, which is why I think it was deferred to V7. So was it ever fixed? And does it still default to Vertical 9:16 instead of Horizontal 16:9 on new tours?
2) When it did a Transition, there was/is no way to stop a random black or a white blank screen briefly appearing (seems browser/platform dependent on which you'd get) before any navigation or other icon/buttons etc. appeared floating in space until the background would load up. Sometimes you get a flash of the 0-100% 'loading bar' appearing (unless you turned it off to save time) and sometimes you'd get a mixture of low-res and high-res panels of the cube appearing before the rest of them popped in behind your buttons/icons. It didn't seem to be prioritising the cube's panels in the direction of travel, so you could get a mix of Black/white, a low-res panel on the left and a high-res on the right before it all filled in. It also doesn't seem to prioritise all the low-res before the high-res.
I'm guessing it's a thread thing? You may ask in the right order, but Javascript still brings your dessert before the starter... It only takes less than a second for this to happen, but it's very distracting and it doesn't seem to be double (or triple?) buffered, so you see all the clunkiness. All this occurs even when navigating a local copy of the tour, unless you'd visited a location already and it was cached when...
...just before the Transition attempt the image would turn to half-res horizontally - so visibly thicker vertical lines/edges - before attempting the fade (the only Transition that didn't jump/zoom too far in Diagonal FoV).
Like this:
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- half-quality.gif (1 MiB) Viewed 1077 times
The 'half-res' explanation was: it was a Javascript problem with cacheing the RAM used for the screen images, so everything is squished to half width to make it fit during the Transition/Fade. I'm guessing it would require some clever juggling to reuse the RAM allocated for the panels behind you and prioritising the direction you were facing to get it to all work smoothly, as in Kuula etc.
I don't want much. Just a fairly simple slight zoom in/crossfaded into another slight zoom in (starting a little way out) into the next location - in Diagonal FoV - with it prioritising the panels that are in front of me (take note of this per location/navigation direction because it can/will change) and loading in those behind me afterwards at full horizontal res with minimal drama and no blanks. Like this:
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- gnomefade2.gif (1 MiB) Viewed 1077 times
I'm not going to immediately do a 180 in the 1st second of a new location to try and catch it out loading those panels I can't yet see behind me.
Also, even on a really, really slow connection / high ping, perhaps using the teeny mini-360 full panorama image that it generates if you select VR mode to very quickly cover up the black/white blanks before it (again in view-facing order) loads up the low-res images and then the high-res ones. Must be some way to beat Javascript with a stick to make it work. What is literally everyone else in this space doing to not experience this?
Oh BTW: I'm still only using Single-Res rather than Multi-Res cube faces, as I had problems with the hundreds of mini-jpegs it produced per location taking too long to load and it never quite choosing the correct resolution on mobiles and tablets, and so always making them blurry. Also some specific problems with large panoramas (25000+ wide) images and looking down and the nadir getting mangled (aerial images). Maybe I'd try using Multi-Res again if the other things have improved.
Once a location was actually loaded, I didn't really have much of a problem with 'missing' features, or the display quality itself - except the lagging of anything overlaid onto the background on slower hardware during rotation - it's just those transitions that made things look clunky.
So, did the FoV maths become more generalised and are Transitions improved at all? Or are they going to be? Is it double/triple buffered? Going to be?
Cheers
