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Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

phoboslab.org

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Re: Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

#111

Post by eru »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #69
chrismonsanto wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a heavy Emacs user. I tried to plan ahead and remap Ctrl -> Caps Lock, but it didn't help. After all, I still used my pinky to hit Caps Lock. Thankfully, hearty remapping of defaults + Kinesis did help!

Maybe remap it to Vim pedal? Someone came up with the idea to use a foot pedal for vim insert mode. It was a little whacky of an idea, but perhaps it'd be more useful as Emacs' meta key. http://hackaday.com/2012/06/21/building-a-clutch-for-vim/

The Kinesis Advantage actually comes with pedals, if you want to.

Re: Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

#112

Post by eru »

sokoloff wrote: post #77
chrismonsanto wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a heavy Emacs user. I tried to plan ahead and remap Ctrl -> Caps Lock, but it didn't help. After all, I still used my pinky to hit Caps Lock. Thankfully, hearty remapping of defaults + Kinesis did help!

I use a foot pedal mapped to Ctrl on my Kinesis (in addition to remapping Caps Lock to Ctrl). For casual use, I use the Caps Lock key; for longer typing sessions, I "bother with" the foot pedal. My biggest problem now is that I look like an absolute clown when typing on a conference room PC (with a standard keyboard)...

Which kinesis keyboard do you have? I've got the Advantage, and Ctrl is already activated with the thumbs by default. That helps a lot.

Re: Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

#114

Post by eru »

phoboslab wrote: post #94
natural219 wrote: post #86

It's not that your game is too hard or too easy. You can dive in a little deeper. It's that your difficulty curve is not tuned properly. IMO you can tune it statically (follow most of the advice here, make it harder). Or, you can use some very basic dynamic difficulty shifting (If they complete the first level in >wpm, ramp up the difficulty, or adjust the difficulty curve as needed). See this great video from Extra…

This is definitely a good idea, but way harder to implement that it looks on the surface. I already spent about 40 hours tuning the game to what it is now and it still sucks. Tuning a dynamic difficulty system would take even more time, mostly testing. And then of course there's the question of what happens with the highscores. If one player is presented with a simpler game than the next, scores are not comparable at…

Just make the score be the highest difficulty level you can still compete on.

Re: Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

#115

Post by derekp7 »

phoboslab wrote: post #92
baby wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still see no challenge in expert mode. Please make a harder mode :)

Author of the game here. It's quite interesting how damn near impossible it is to balance a game like that. When I first released it, it had no expert mode. I tried to make the normal mode challenging for most people without making it too frustrating. The feedback I got was mostly "it's way too easy", but I also got a few comments, particularly on Kongregate and other sites that appeal to younger users that "it's way…

How about having a level-set screen, that simply has you type out a couple of given paragraphs. It can then dynamically figure out your overall typing speed, and if there are specific areas that need improvement (certain letter combinations, words, phrases, etc).

Re: Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

#116

Post by bad_user »

It's a really nice game, but what I don't like is that sometimes I get stuck on some word that I've hit by mistake or not and I have to search it on the screen, to see what that word is. And especially at high levels, when the screen is full, you end up losing the game. As a suggestion ... write the current word in the bottom right corner or something.

Re: Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

#117

Post by sokoloff »

spudlyo wrote: post #101
sokoloff wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a foot pedal mapped to Ctrl on my Kinesis (in addition to remapping Caps Lock to Ctrl). For casual use, I use the Caps Lock key; for longer typing sessions, I "bother with" the foot pedal. My biggest problem now is that I look like an absolute clown when typing on a conference room PC (with a standard keyboard)...

You should really take advantage of those lovely left side thumb buttons on the Kinesis. I have control and meta on the two largest left thumb buttons, which works great for me.

Funny. I read your and eru's comment and thought, "no they're not!". Then I looked down and said, "Holy crap; they are!"

I may try to retrain myself, but it's been years and years of ingraining current physical patterns, so I'm not super hopeful. (It took me the better part of year to get used to the foot pedal, mostly to remember not to futz with it casually while I was just typing. Holding Control foot pedal while typing the word 'taxes' is painful in Windows apps...)

Re: Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

#118

Post by byuu »

baby wrote: post #79
Spittie wrote: post #66

Nice game. I remember playing it some time ago, and quitting because of boredom once getting in the high (30+) levels. I think it was one of the first "little" games using html5 instead of flash. I see that they've introduced a new "expert" mode, which is indeed a lot harder. I've reached level 10 so far, but I'll give it a serious try sometime. The biggest problem for me is the language. I type a lot of English, but…

I still see no challenge in expert mode. Please make a harder mode :)

Expert mode was easy until you get the bigger ships throwing the whole alphabet in one-letter tiles at you. I keep starting to type a longer word and it only destroys a tiny one-letter item instead, and then starts matching something else entirely and I have to waste time finding what it focused on.

I can get up to around 110wpm without errors in a general typing test, but because of this constant mistargeting, I was capped around 60wpm with 90% accuracy.

Re: Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

#119

Post by mindcrime »

Very nice. I played up to level 20 on "normal" mode, will go back for a go on "expert" mode later. I can definitely see how this could be very useful for beginners who are learning to type, or anyone trying to ramp up there speed.

Good job!

Re: Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

#120

Post by mindcrime »

bad_user wrote: post #116

It's a really nice game, but what I don't like is that sometimes I get stuck on some word that I've hit by mistake or not and I have to search it on the screen, to see what that word is. And especially at high levels, when the screen is full, you end up losing the game. As a suggestion ... write the current word in the bottom right corner or something.

I noticed that too... it's easy up until you make your first mistake, and that can really throw you off. But maybe that's exactly part of what makes it fun!
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