Beginner-friendly UI about orbitx HOT 6 CLOSED

I don't think we'll ever be able to close this, but I assigned it to Sean since it was technically a feature request from spacesimmers.

from orbitx.

So far from demos, people have:

• put 0 in time acceleration (we should give examples of sane values for time acceleration)
• not realized they had to scroll
• put in lower-case 'Earth' to centre on planets (again, examples of sane values)
• been confused obviously when the graphics didn't load first try in appmode
• not realized that there was an exception (there's no visual feedback of this)

Putting this here so that maybe we can put clarifying text to help this

EDIT: addressed most of these

from orbitx.

TODO:

1. Instead of starting GUI right after running the program, we can display label in the middle with step-by-step instruction showing how to use the GUI.
2. Make a flag variable to turn the instruction on. flight.py -instruction

from orbitx.

Another possibility for toggling instructions: since vpython captions are just HTML code (notice I inserted CSS in it), we could maybe even have a tiny javascript function that hides the input cheatsheet when the user clicks on something?

Whichever approach we take, I think the use case would be:

• 10% of the time, orbitx will be started by someone who doesn't know how to use it for the first time
• 90% of the time, orbitx will be used by someone who is trained on it and knows how to use it, but might want to be reminded of controls

EDIT: this was addressed by commit a0e5d2

from orbitx.

• point out that people have to focus on the vpython video area before zooming etc, or pressing keys so they don't focus on something else (fixed in 0af69a)

• make trails default to off, instead of on

from orbitx.

• restrict how the user can rotate the camera (probably using scene.forward or scene.up whatever) so that you are always looking top to bottom

from orbitx.