[2019] Sliders don't accelerate anymore, again.

Thanks u/Switcherzz_ and u/CatstructorPenny! I'll let the team know that this bug has returned. We'll get it taken care of <3

That is precisely what we are trying to improve and more. The DPad we want to be precise updates to the slider. The sticks we want to be able to do precision or do speed.

The problem with the old sliders was that they accelerated at an unbounded rate, and didn't pay attention to the actual range of values you were moving between. It treated 0 to 10 the same as 0 to 10000000, and so you would very quickly traverse the 0-10 gap and it became impossible to be precise at all with the sticks, it would also move in fractions of permitted steps, and so sometimes the slider would "update", but you'd see no difference in value.

The new sliders work like this, on DPad, we increment at a constant rate, to ensure predictability - in the same way when you hold down a key on a keyboard you expect the key repeat to remain constant. For the sticks, they don't accelerate. They are based on covering the slider range in constant time at the sticks full tilt, rather than accelerating arbitrarily. That is - if I were to move the stick entirely to the right, I would expect to cover the distance from one side of the slider to the other in constant time. That way when I'm dealing with low numbers 0..10, it goes from 0 to 10 in lets say 5 seconds at max speed, and if I had to go between 0..1000000, I'm clearly dealing with a much different magnitude of item, so lets move the slider at whatever speed is needed to cover that same range in 5 seconds. The sticks were also substantially improved to be able to handle precise tweaks, since they no longer accelerate you can hold the stick a little to the left or right, and get a low number of steps along the slider per second and never have to worry about it suddenly accelerate to 100s of units per second.

Additionally the old sliders exposed a ton of options that if UI designers didn't tweak properly the sliders just didn't work well for that range - so with the changes outlined above the idea is to bring uniformity across the UI, and ideally make everyones life a lot easier.

I hope that helps explain what we're trying to achieve - my apologies if this didn't make it into the patch notes. Would be more than happy to discuss improvements.

/u/Switcherzz just t be sure - this video is you using the DPad right?

I can look at the DPad speed again, and see if maybe there's something we can do for people that prefer to use it. What I definitely want to maintain is the problem /u/danman7575 alluded to, which was the old behavior made precision input very difficult, so as long as the DPad doesn't accelerate for a good second we'd probably be alright - something to try.

Similar to /u/Switcherzz - are you also finding this to be better in 10.30?