Wednesday, September 5, 2012

HM1 vs HM2 - Comparison

I have been playing several years with HM1, then played exclusively with HM2 for 8 months and now when HM2 got a rare error which only could be solved with a full format, I have been playing 2-3 months now with HM1 again and I felt like it would be time for a comparison. One would think that HM2 would be a natural evolution (and better) then HM1 but with my experience then this is perhaps not all that clear.

One note that I would like to make is that I have indepth analysis with HM1 but since my game is pretty decent (and that I have been more lazy) then I havnt really investigated all the new more advanced features of HM2.

Part 1 - HUD, differences etc
The biggest difference for me going back and forth was the HUD. The new popupsystem seemed like it would be a wonderful upgrade. You can change font, color stats, use lines etc. These could seem like minor details but if you have constructed your own popups in HM1 then you would enjoy these changes as they make everything more clearer and smooth. I personally go with a medium-high amount of stats but I removed some to use more popups because it looks nicer and prevents me from all in all being a statsjunky. So I believe I showed like 15-18 stats and occasionally use popups. I also play mainly FLSH so a lot of the less obvious stats like CBet% 3bet pots OOP in SB etc isnt all that interesting.

Another difference which I like is that you can overlay your different panels and it looks a lot nicer.

Now to the actual functionality. This is where HM2 crumbles. Everything related to the HUD is just mad slower in all the 2-3 installations+formatting I have done with HM2. First I thought it could be that I was a beta tester and it was an early version but I did my least clean format + install in 2012 and everything I dont like is still there.

1) The most annoying thing is that the popups are very much delayed and you often have to wait for them to popup. It doesnt really matter whether you change the popup speed (to what u had on HM1 for example) or if u switch to click to popup. They come up slowly and I have often missed the opportunity to check the stats while playing. Very annoying.

2) Check last pot. This is by far the buggiest of them all. It is impossible for me to get up the last played hand from the HUD in a reasonable amount of time. Once I click on the last pot it usually takes 30+ seconds for it to popup and I believe it is popped up below the tables but I am not sure about this. I was very glad to easily be able to go back and mark interesting hands while playing once I switched back to HM1. 

3) Stay on top in general. I am not really sure how to describe it but all notetaking and changes to the HUD is usually very hard to do. If you would like to change what HUD to use in HM1 then you can go to settings and if something pops up and steals focus then you could go to table manager and continue. This is not the case with HM2. You have to doubleclick on settings again and be superquick to take the menu off somewhere where there is no table and just hope to finish finding your hud before another table takes your attention. This completly sucks. I do not remember how I did it with HM2 but something similar happen when you try to take notes. There could be a long delay and then the window for notetaking gets placed and you have to do it extremly quickly as well.

All in all, the HUD should in theory be better but in practice it certainly is not.

(Ill continue with more steps as I have more time)

No comments:

Post a Comment

#navbar { height: 0px; visibility: hidden; display: none; } #navbar { height: 0px; visibility: hidden; display: none; }