Having played far too much EteRNA in the short time since I gained access I thought I should voice some things that have occurred to me.
I’d like to be able to see the natural and synthetic views of a puzzle simultaneously. Perhaps one being the faint background to the play area.
The camera does not keep focus on the area of the puzzle I am looking at when I switch from the natural to systhetic view. I understand that when the strand re-arranges itself bases may end up in wildly different areas, having the camera attempt to keep most of the bases in the view consistant with maybe auto zooming or being able to ‘tag’ the bases to keep the focus.
I’d like to be able to view my previous solutions for a puzzle to utilise them when attempting the same puzzle at a different difficulty lvl, or perhaps even be able to store or view any of my previous works in order to take elements and shapes that have worked in other puzzles, perhaps even dragging and dropping them as strands into my current puzzle.
Perhaps also a sort of clipboard of previous live attempts at something i’m working on would be nice, so that if frustration gets the better of me and I hit reset I can still access those patterns in my new solution.
A mode to view the way in which bases may be attracted to each other. When zoomed into bases, there are the little arrow type things visible but they are limited in how helpful they are. This would be a suitable excuse for some very pretty visual effects. (having difficulty expressing what I actually mean for this idea, hopefully someone else vaguely gets what I mean)
Thank you for the kind compliments and fantastic advice. Your first three suggestions have been noted as feature requests #s 215, 216, and 217 in the bug tracker. I, for one, definitely agree that the centering issue when switching between nature and target mode is distracting. I believe that the clipboard idea is already listed as feature #171, which we have chosen to defer for now. As far as your final request, I’m having trouble visualizing what you have in mind. It sounds really cool, and perhaps if you could elaborate more, we could think about this further.
We will discuss your first three feature requests in our developer’s meeting tomorrow. I should warn you that the developers are currently busy with some pretty fundamental site restructuring, and we plan to mostly defer interface tweaks until this is done. In any event, we’ll get back to you about whether we decide to implement immediately or defer.
Thank you again for your helpful suggestions. We wanted to followup with you. Due to limited development resources, we have been forced to defer working on bugs 215 and 216.
However, feature request #217 (replayability) has turned into a major focus of our development efforts in the lead-up to our January 11 launch. Unfortunately, this is a complicated task which will require changing several aspects of the game, but please bear with us. We should have a preliminary version of puzzle replayability in early January.
Please keep sending in valuable feedback as we prepare to launch. Thank you for helping make EteRNA excellent!
RE: A mode to view the way in which bases may be attracted to each other. When zoomed into bases, there are the little arrow type things visible but they are limited in how helpful they are. This would be a suitable excuse for some very pretty visual effects.
So imagine little plasma-ish, aurora-like interconnections between mutually attracted bases, the more intense the attraction, or the lower the resultant energy state, the brighter the filamental connections could be. The focus of these links could be limited to a mouse-over condition of a particular base or a full on over the top all inclusive ‘electric-sheep’ style display. Players could then make pretty artworks in a doodling like fashion. Meanwhile their brains can get on with trying to work out the puzzles subconsciously.
Whilst not entirely a practical or sensible suggestion, it could be aesthetically pleasing to some minds out there.
We need more beta testers!