Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> If you can't estimate progress in a meaningful way, don't pretend that 
> you can. ;-)

  I actually had that problem with a puzzle solver I had to make for our
first iPhone game. (There's a glimpse of it here:
http://gamesandinnovation.com/2010/02/10/hopido-design-post-mortem/ )

  The problem was that when the puzzle was large enough, the progress
would often advance like
0% -> 0.000001% -> 0.000002% -> ... -> 0.000158% -> 2.026041% -> 2.026042%
-> 5.0% -> 80.0% -> 100%, or similar. Just putting the percentage on
screen was not informative at all, no matter what I tried. (Often the
percentage would look like the program had halted completely because it
changed only so little that it would have required like 8 decimals to
show the change.)

  What I ended up doing instead was to show the current search path as
lines of changing colors over the puzzle, updating a few times per second.
Doesn't tell you much about the progress, but shows clearly that the
program is doing something.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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