I blogged about EteRNA last night:
http://gasstationwithoutpumps.wordpre…
I had several suggestions for improvements to the interface
Just read through the article - this is truly a useful analysis of the game!
I’m writing down your suggestions into our task list and here’s my take on some of your suggestions.
The buttons that can take you out of the puzzle - I assume you mean manu buttons? In fact, we had it so that when you click on it, it just pops up a new window. We quickly realized that builds up to many windows at once, get quite annoying. Perhaps what we need is a protection to prevent misclicking from paintings.
As for the choosing colors, I’m not sure if you already know this, but each paint brushes are hooked up to hotkeys 1,2,3,4 and 5. It’ll come in handy when you are playing large puzzles.
- EteRNA team
ACGU would be better hot-keys than 1234 (maybe T as a synonmym for U
to keep things in the left hand).
Even if I hide the stupid chat box, it still leaves a dead area on the
screen where clicking doesn’t work properly. Can you have an option
to get rid of the chat box entirely?
What does the paintbrush key optimize when picking the best base in a
loop? The minimum energy or the gap between the best and second-best
conformation? Is there any way to get that gap, which may be a better
measure of stability than just the energy of the lowest-energy
structure.
I’m also not sure what the goal of the Designs in the lab are, so it
is difficult to decide what to design in and what to vote for.