Well, after monumental struggles, following the documentation more carefully, and applying my own wits to fill in gaps in the documentation, I got “Hello World” to sort of work on Pavlovia. But I still have a few mysteries with this trivial exercise.
For this exercise, I have a single Routine, named “trial”, with two components. I have a Text component, named “text”, that displays a message with no time limit, and just for fun I set the Orientation to 45. And I have a Keyboard component, named “key_resp”, that allows any key and forces the end of the Routine.
When I run this locally from the Runner, it shows my text rotated 45° clockwise, then waits for a key press. When I run this from Pavlovia using the Pilot button, or use the Runner to “Run JS for local debug”, it shows my text and waits for a key press, but this time the text is rotated 45° counterclockwise (instead of clockwise). And when I use the Runner to “Run JS on Pavlovia”, I get a page that says “initialising the experiment…” and nothing else. What is going on here??
Maybe I just need more documentation for Pavlovia.
Background details:
Dell Optiplex 990
Windows 7 Professional SP1 64-bit
PsychoPy v2020.1.3 Standalone
The clockwise/counterclockwise thing is our error. PsychoPy took a non-conventional approach at least for engineering/compSci* and when Alain ported the code to JS he didn’t notice that I wasn’t following convention on this one. So he stuck with tradition. In 2020.2 both online and lab-based will rotate clockwise.
The issue with not running from the Runner window is a puzzle. We do normally expect pilotting to be set from the pavlovia interface rather than PsychoPy btu I’m surprised there isn’t a more clear message for you linking you back to the Pavlovia Dashboard.
*my thinking was just that although engineers rotate counterclockise following polar coordinate rotation, non-engineers think of rotation clockwise following, well, a clock. This is one of the few breaks with convention that I regret (most of them I stand by) but we’re here now and better to stick with it at this point I think
Could you share a link to your project (either the gitlab.pavlovia.org url or the run.pavlovia.org one) and I’ll look into what’s going on with your study.
Basically we need to get to an error message in order to debug it