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phetsims / energy-skate-park-basics

"Energy Skate Park: Basics" is an educational simulation in HTML5, by PhET Interactive Simulations.
http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulation/energy-skate-park-basics
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Save tracks or sessions #52

Closed samreid closed 10 years ago

samreid commented 10 years ago

For testing this sim, it would be great if testers could easily share tracks to make buggy scenarios easier to reproduce. Using scenery input event recording or state-saving may help out here. Storage in the cloud would be simplest for the testers.

patricialoeblein commented 10 years ago

Being able to save tracks has been a very useful feature for this sim as it is in CCK. I would strongly vote for including this feature. I was thinking that if a teacher wanted to use saved tracks, they would use computers instead of cloud machines, but I see the movement to cloud based computing expanding exponentially because most standardized testing is going to digital cloud.

samreid commented 10 years ago

Simplest possible thing that could be helpful: store tracks & initial coordinates for skater, for debugging. Maybe 1st draft of sim event data collection?

samreid commented 10 years ago

It may be easier for the user to have a save UI (like a disk icon or download icon) next to the track so that it will indicate it is for saving tracks. However, in my opinion, it should save more than just the track: it must also save the state of the skater, and I would also recommend to save the state of the UI options in the control panel as well. After going to this extent, it may be best to take it one step further and save the state of the entire sim (all 3 screens), not just the playground screen. But then it is less clear where to put the UI. Perhaps in the PhetMenu? But then people might not see it. We could put Save/Load in the PhET Menu and another copy by the tracks control panel. Or perhaps a separate popup menu by the word "Energy Skate Park: Basics" in the navbar since the save/load here are specific to this sim?

On the other hand, the save/load options in the Java Energy Skate Park are somewhat buried, so it may be OK to leave it in the PhetMenu and then we have the option to make this work for other sims too. I would also like to expand this in the future to be able to save/load to disk or save/load to the cloud.

samreid commented 10 years ago

The state can now be stored to the URL. This won't work on IE or other browsers with a low URL length limit. We could try zipping the URL, or pruning it. But it might be good enough for now to use for internal testing and bug replication.

samreid commented 10 years ago

As I mentioned in https://github.com/phetsims/joist/issues/103, in my opinion the Save State to URL is working sufficiently good enough that it can be used for testing & debugging. However, this feature should be removed before publishing the sim because it would take too much effort at this point to make it permanent & cross platform. I recommend to re-evaluate in 2014 Q4 or later if/when we address more API issues from the Moore foundation conference.

samreid commented 10 years ago

Closing based on above remarks.