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In-Flight Entertainment Challenge

blog.mand3l.com

11–20 of 84 posts

Re: In-Flight Entertainment Challenge

#11

Here’s another challenge: Create fun games to play in these flights. The games available are usually poor and slow. Is it a technical limitation such as too many screens and not enough processing power to go around? Or maybe no good HID (Human Interface Device) controllers? Touch-screens should be okay, especially for turn-based games, but maybe continuously pushing your finger against the screen would make the perso…

I was on a Japan Air flight about 10 years ago that had Street Fighter 2. It was on a crappy remote controller with vaguely SNES colored buttons. It was alright but your finger would inevitably slip and hit a game exiting button by mistake.

Still, it’s got to the be the most niche SF2 port ever made. Probably easy openings for the top spot.

Re: In-Flight Entertainment Challenge

#12
> Slick draggable scrolling is a key part of many screens in Delta’s in-flight entertainment system (complete with momentum-based flicks, over-scroll, page-snapping, etc). Because I didn’t have access to a component library and hadn’t thought to pre-install a good drag scroll library, I ended up having to build my own.

Shouldn’t have been using any drag scroll library. This is very strongly something that you should never do on the web, because it doesn’t have the right primitives to make it anything other than bad. Scrolljacking is always bad.

The proper solution is to just use normal scroll containers. Seriously.

That provides what you want for touch-based scrolling, without ruining click-and-drag or scroll-wheel or keyboard scrolling. It gets you your momentum-based flicks, leaves overscroll behaviour up to the user agent (which will be bounce on some platforms like Apple’s I believe, a glowing indicator on others like Android I believe, and nothing on some if you’ve also hidden the scrollbar with `scrollbar-width: none`), and you can use CSS Scroll Snap to control snapping if you want (though frankly I think it’s almost always better not to try to control that stuff).

Re: In-Flight Entertainment Challenge

#13

Here’s another challenge: Create fun games to play in these flights. The games available are usually poor and slow. Is it a technical limitation such as too many screens and not enough processing power to go around? Or maybe no good HID (Human Interface Device) controllers? Touch-screens should be okay, especially for turn-based games, but maybe continuously pushing your finger against the screen would make the perso…

The trend is just to have you use an iPad or iPhone with local video and games available from the plane's Wifi. This pretty normal on US shorthaul US flights now, since those things are way better than anything built into the headrest.

Re: In-Flight Entertainment Challenge

#14
post #7

Here’s another challenge: Create fun games to play in these flights. The games available are usually poor and slow. Is it a technical limitation such as too many screens and not enough processing power to go around? Or maybe no good HID (Human Interface Device) controllers? Touch-screens should be okay, especially for turn-based games, but maybe continuously pushing your finger against the screen would make the perso…

I don't think adding a nice controller and cool games to play would be prohibitedly expensive. But it is an investment and someone needs to take the risk. It's entirely possible that they spend all this money creating this thing and no one uses and just watch films the whole trip. You're probably better off getting a switch or a steam deck. It has the added benefit that you can finish your game afterwards, after the…

> I don't think adding a nice controller and cool games to play would be prohibitedly expensive.

Yeah, but it would be more expensive than dirt cheap.

I see it all the time; you wouldn't think a huge company would have a problem spending money on something. But, at the end of the day, it's all about that department's budgets and priorities.

Re: In-Flight Entertainment Challenge

#15
post #7

Here’s another challenge: Create fun games to play in these flights. The games available are usually poor and slow. Is it a technical limitation such as too many screens and not enough processing power to go around? Or maybe no good HID (Human Interface Device) controllers? Touch-screens should be okay, especially for turn-based games, but maybe continuously pushing your finger against the screen would make the perso…

I don't think adding a nice controller and cool games to play would be prohibitedly expensive. But it is an investment and someone needs to take the risk. It's entirely possible that they spend all this money creating this thing and no one uses and just watch films the whole trip. You're probably better off getting a switch or a steam deck. It has the added benefit that you can finish your game afterwards, after the…

>I don't think adding a nice controller and cool games to play would be prohibitedly expensive.

Everything like that on an aircraft (nice controller) has to be certified for every specific type, etc. Lots of process, paperwork, testing, etc.

Re: In-Flight Entertainment Challenge

#16
post #2

html width 100% height 100% overflow: hidden Please don't do this. I would love to try it, but it's unusable on phone even on desktop mode.

Considering it was made in less than 7 hours with no access to the internet, I'd excuse hacks. Edit: Especially since it's called out as a constraint: > Don’t worry about production quality, just re-create as much of the look and feel of the UI as quickly as possible. No accessibility, responsive design, localization, etc; you just want something you can run through a user test.

Maybe should have spent less time to not have time to write overflow hidden then.

Re: In-Flight Entertainment Challenge

#17
A few years when my children were young enough , I was shopping around for couple of those backseat LCD screens to plug a dvd player or media player into for long distance trips. Eventually I used a Raspberry pi and HDMI splitter back in those days to run Kodi. I spent quite a bit of time editing XML on a Kodi theme to disable some elements and make the UI as simple as possible. A kodi or other media player UI theme like this would've been great. 10-12 inch touch screen displays are relatively cheap now. Finding a Raspberry Pi 4 at reasonable price might be hard right now. But there are cheaper alternatives to that as well.

Re: In-Flight Entertainment Challenge

#20
post #15
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think adding a nice controller and cool games to play would be prohibitedly expensive. But it is an investment and someone needs to take the risk. It's entirely possible that they spend all this money creating this thing and no one uses and just watch films the whole trip. You're probably better off getting a switch or a steam deck. It has the added benefit that you can finish your game afterwards, after the…

>I don't think adding a nice controller and cool games to play would be prohibitedly expensive. Everything like that on an aircraft (nice controller) has to be certified for every specific type, etc. Lots of process, paperwork, testing, etc.

I used to fly on planes that had “fancy” controllers - they had lots of buttons (full QWERTY keyboard, ABXY and d-pad, special buttons for controlling the lights and calling the attendants, etc.) and slotted into a latched recess right below the IFE. Something like this: https://www.vecteezy.com/photo/11024929

There’s no analog stick and the ergonomics aren’t that great, but it’s definitely usable as a controller.

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