time delays and paddings should be controllable from the Admin page

[amaatouq]

in the Admin dashboard, we should provide a tab that determines all the paddings and delays in the game. Between rounds, between stages, time buffer for synchronization, etc. They also can be set to 0 and make the transition jumpy, if desired.

You can imagine when running an online experiment then we might want to add more buffer compared to when running a lab experiment (i.e., all participants are on the same local network). Same when all players are from the US, or from around the world etc.

[npaton]

Note that giving people more knobs they do not know the full implication of leads to more cognitive overhead and/or makes people choose poorly. The buffer time was not invented to annoy people, it is meant to deal with the reality of slow and unreliable networks and computers (we are not only dealing with network latency, also potential render latency on the client, we have relatively good computers and it's easy to forget we have somewhat ideal conditions).

To reformulate this as a pure problem: the buffer times between rounds feel too important.

Other solutions might be to either optimize this automatically or give the option of presets: Optimize performance for LAN, country or global. Just ideas. ;)

[amaatouq]

I am thinking out loud here to bear with me.

I agree that we don't want to cognitively overload the game designer, so maybe we have 'good' default values and add a note saying that we recommend that they don't change them. But for me, when testing and on local networks, it feels a bit weird.

Also, I think more importantly having control over the padding and delays that we added recently (between stages, from the lobby to the game etc) that controls the smoothness of the changes of the interface.

Also, I was wondering whether we can put the breadcrumb back into the round and have a helper function that decides which component to reload on each round/stage change and which one is sticky (i.e., if I wanted to have both, the breadcrumb to be sticky & the player profile ... but the task response reloads and gets affected by the buffer etc).

let's discuss this in one of our future meetings including whether we can