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Have You Read Fitts' Law?

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This is a feature request. Feature requests can be voted up by supporters.
Current Priority: +0
Topic Starter
YukiKazeKitsune
The first thing I thought when I read http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html was this awesome game.

I really think that it's the perfect idea to consider for osu!, because it has such a direct effect upon the ease of gameplay. Osu! is all about moving your mouse and clicking to a rhythm, so anything that affects difficulty is important to utilize.

More or less, I see a few different ways in which it is applicable and may be useful in making this game's difficulty more dynamic.

First of all, Fitts' Law:
- The further a target is from the mouse, the larger it must be to retain reaction time.

Among the various possible implications, here are a few implementations which you could use:

:arrow: An option in the editor to dynamically increase the size of targets according to distance
As distance from last target increases, the next target's size is increased by a factor chosen in the editor. Likely, an increase of 10 pixels in diameter per 100-200 pixels distance would be reasonable. The exact distance before the increase should be selectable and also disabled for harder songs. Essentially, this is for easy mode.

:arrow: A mod to increase target size by distance, rather than an option in the editor. If implemented as a mod, then the hard version would decrease target size. With these mods, the change can't be too noticeable; just enough to subtly aid or hinder the person (and maybe exaggerated versions which are quite drastic and give increased rewards).

I've been playing this game and so far it's absolutely wonderful! You've done an excellent job on designing the menus; it feels completely natural and I have a hard time finding anything done wrong :D I feel that not only is this game done the way it should have been, but also that it has a polish I rarely see in other games, especially in terms of the controls. I'll be honest, I suck at this game, but it's been remarkably easy to improve. It's made so well in fact, that the majority of my problems now are just that my computer lags; when I began a week or so ago, I couldn't even finish an easy song. I'm already onto the slower hard songs :)

Anyways, I figured that you might be interested in Fitts' Law because it's incredibly useful for controlling this game's difficulty ^_^
D33d
Yes, I'm very familiar with it and it would benefit others as well. However, this isn't the place for talking about it, unless you want a Fitt's tutorial to be linked somewhere.
chaotic_iak
The OP gave requests which are inspired from Fitts' law; probably only too much preamble that you didn't notice the requests.

The thing is, as it currently stands, Easy/Normal diffs more or less have equal spacing everywhere, so the Fitts' law will only state that all targets should be of equal size (because the reaction time has been offset by the distance). Unless I'm missing your point or the ranking criteria about this is changed, I don't see the point of your requests.
D33d
To anybody who knows what they're doing, it's a given that easier difficulties should use larger objects and shorter spacing. I find that I can use huge objects in [Easy] to allow for faster sliders, thus giving it plenty of momentum and still keeping it very possible for novices to follow everything.
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