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Newsletter 10

Last modified: 31-Jan-99

The questionnaire results

In April 1997 I created an electronic questionnaire for users of KiteFlight. KiteFlight users were asked in Newsletter 9 and by E-mail to fill in the online questionnaire. There were about 35 responses - more or less the amount which I had expected. You can still provide input via this questionnaire: I will read your answsers, but will only update the statistics below if the number of new replies is significant.

The questions

The questionnaire consisted of several questions about the user's degree of interest in kite flying, questions about the computer the person normally used, and questions about the person's views about KiteFlight.

The main purpose of the questionnaire was however to get a feeling for the needs and wishes of the current users regarding potential enhancements to KiteFlight. This part of the questionnaire consisted of a list (see below) of possible improvements. Users were invited to select 3 items from the list which they considered to be important and to rank these in priority ("high", "higher", "highest").

make a real Windows version of KiteFlight
add the ability to directly print diagrams
get STACK/AKA/AJSKA to support the KF1 standard
add support for quad-line kites
add support for indoor flying
add ability to display how kite lines are entangled
use 3-D animation
make it easier to create your own routine
ability to customize shape/color of the kites
extend library of compulsory routines
extend library of (team) routines
support for axels (etc.)
ability to start animation at any segment in a routine
add subroutine support to kite control language
other (please describe in an "Other suggestions" box)

Note that the questions were designed to reflect the user's perspective on KiteFlight rather than a programmer's perspective: users don't normally know whether a requirement is difficult to implement, don't know whether two enhancements are technically related, or know whether I (as the author of the program) have any idea of how to solve their wish. I will give some comments from my own perspective later on.

The answers

I received 33 valid responses. To simplify the interpretation of the results, I awarded points to each of the wishes. A wish received 4 points if it was someone's highest priority, 2 points if it was someone's second highest priority, and 1 point if it was someone's third priority. The following diagram shows the current points per wish.

Points per possible KiteFlight improvement (9-Oct-97)

Note that some items received points although they were not originally on the list because they were suggested by users in the "other comments" box. These items might have received more points if they had been on the list from the start.

Comments on the main items

38 points for "Make it easier to create your own routine"
Although I know that it isn't easy to create a routine, I believe that this complexity of creating a multi-kite routine is largely inherent to the problem (even though the end result may look simple in the air or in the animation). See my previous comments about this problem. I thus certainly agree with the users, but don't quite know how to effectively solve this problem. This clear message from the users will help me keep my eyes open for a solution. Suggestions are welcome.

36 points for "Make a real Windows version of KiteFlight"
The vast majority of the PC community is using Windows. I expected this point to get the most votes. A practical note is that the KF32 version of KiteFlight is already Windows 95 aware in the sense that it detects the presence of Windows 95 and takes certain technical measures to ensure a smooth animation. More significantly, a full Windows version of KiteFlight is a lot of work.

27 points for "Add ability to directly print diagrams"
KiteFlight users can currently only print diagrams using an indirect method. Directly printing diagrams under KiteFlight control is a rather messy business under MS-DOS: the program needs to know how to control a matrix printer, a laser printers, a B/W ink jet printer, a color ink jet printer, etc. In "a real Windows version of KiteFlight" direct printing does become realistic because much of the work is done by printer drivers provided by the operating system. A hypothetical Windows version of KF would thus automatically support any common printer type and accommodate the various printing options supported by these printers.

26 points for "Add ability to display entangled kite lines"
I believe I know how to do this (my friend Niek Lambert and I developed an algorithm to solve the tricky mathematics of this problem). Actual incorporation of this feature into KiteFlight would require a way of displaying the line entanglement and one or two extensions to the KF1 language (to handle kite teams who move around to limit line wrapping).

23 points for "Add support for axels and similar tricks"
This would require extension to the KF1 language, as well as significant changes to the core of KiteFlight itself: in a sense, axels are a step towards 3-D kite motion.

16 points for "Add 3-D graphics"
The latest generation of PCs contain processors and display hardware which allow high speed rendering of objects in 3 dimensions. Using such hardware, a user could choose to view the kites from any position or angle, add a background sky image and possibly view special 3-D effects like axels or indoor routines. Regardless of the actual utility of such features, 3-D graphics clearly has a lot of appeal. I thus expect that this request will become even more important as people become acquainted with the capabilities of all this new hardware and get accustomed to seeing 3-D applications (e.g. games) on a daily basis. Although 3-D graphics is a very large leap forward for a humble MS-DOS animation program, I think KiteFlight or its successors should seriously consider using this new technology.

16 points for "Add ability to start animation at any segment"
People who voted for this are typically active KiteFlight users: you only run into this problem if you used KiteFlight to create or seriously study routines. The current KiteFlight user interface already has provisions for providing this feature, but I haven't gotten around to investigating exactly how to implement this yet. It might be easy to solve, but I don't know for sure.

12 points for "Add support for quad-line kites"
I had some discussions with John Mitchell, a well known quad pilot based in Germany, about this. The point is that this involves more than just new kite shapes: quad-line kites can move backwards and sideways. KiteFlight currently assumes that a kite moves in the direction in which it is pointing. This assumption is normally correct for dual-line kites (notable exceptions: certain landings and slides), but quite often wrong for quads.

10 points for "Get STACK/AKA/AJSKA support for KF1 standard"
I hadn't expected any interest at all in this "organizational" point. At present, officials in these organizations undoubtedly know about KiteFlight but stick to the use of paper to officially describe compulsory routines. Paper has its strong points and its weak points. KiteFlight has its strong points and its weak points. I don't want to go into more detail about their merits here, would welcome a discussion with these organizations on this.

The future

At present, I cannot give a straightforward plan of how to proceed. Firstly, I see the feedback from the users as one of the ingredients of the puzzle. Other ingredients are how much work is required for a particular modification and how much I would enjoy making that modification (all this is hardly a commercial endeavor, as you know). It's thus more complicated than just concluding "the voters have decided they want more ease-of-programming".

The second complication is time. The amount of time needed to make these changes is daunting: most of the simple enhancements have already been made; the list at hand contains almost exclusively the hard nuts to crack. My time constraints may imply having to stop work on this project altogether. More positive scenarios involve utilizing commercial building blocks to implement some of the required functionality and seeking ways of sharing the burden among a few enthusiasts (both expert users and expert programmers).

In recent months I have spent some time experimenting with 3-D animation techniques. The capabilities of the current hardware and software for visualizing static or dynamic Virtual Reality scenes turns out to be very impressive. The main keyword here is VRML 2.0, a major new standard which is supported by both key World Wide Web browsers (read: Netscape 4.0 and Internet Explorer 4.0). Another key element is the emergence of high performance chips for 3-D graphics (e.g. 3Dfx, Permedia 2, RIVA). People are buying these chips in large numbers (mainly to play 3-D games). This causes the price of 3-D graphics boards to drop, thereby making them attractive to an even wider audience. This familiar pattern in the PC industry has previously convinced the world that every PC needs loudspeakers, a CD-ROM drive, a multi-Gigabyte hard disk, a color printer, etc. The same is about to happen to 3-D hardware. I will try to explain my ideas (and/or dreams) about the 3-D future of kite routine animation in another issue of this newsletter.

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Direct any remarks or questions to Peter van den Hamer (vdhamer@msn.com).