Comments on: Planning Ahead http://www.hiwiller.com/2008/11/11/planning-ahead/ Zack Hiwiller's Blog on Game Design and The Industry Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:48:05 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Bryan http://www.hiwiller.com/2008/11/11/planning-ahead/comment-page-1/#comment-430 Bryan Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:17:17 +0000 http://www.hiwiller.com/?p=280#comment-430 Your screen has plenty of space there too, so that's not an issue. What we tend to do in space-limited situations is provide enough space for what the "normal" use case, and then squish it horizontally if someone decides to put in a name of "WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWMW" or something stupid like that. It can become somewhat unreadable in extreme cases on standard-def displays, but if you can't read your own player's name because the characters are too wide, then it's your own fault. But because the band and the song title are both 16 characters then I'm guessing they simply limit it to 32 bytes of PAD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program-associated_data) per song. The only thing I can think of to make this sort of acceptable is that they have to broadcast enough information for all of the channels and songs playing all of the time, so that a receiver turned on at any point can get it. But I, for one, wouldn't mind waiting a few more seconds in order to see the entirety of a song's name. Your screen has plenty of space there too, so that’s not an issue. What we tend to do in space-limited situations is provide enough space for what the “normal” use case, and then squish it horizontally if someone decides to put in a name of “WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWMW” or something stupid like that. It can become somewhat unreadable in extreme cases on standard-def displays, but if you can’t read your own player’s name because the characters are too wide, then it’s your own fault.

But because the band and the song title are both 16 characters then I’m guessing they simply limit it to 32 bytes of PAD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program-associated_data) per song. The only thing I can think of to make this sort of acceptable is that they have to broadcast enough information for all of the channels and songs playing all of the time, so that a receiver turned on at any point can get it. But I, for one, wouldn’t mind waiting a few more seconds in order to see the entirety of a song’s name.

]]>