Think Tank: Touch Control

[darkgod]

Starting in version 1.3 the game will receive touch events (touches, drags, multitouch, ..).
It won't do anything with them yet but could be made to so I'd like you all to collect here your thoughts about what a good touch-enabled UI would be and how it would react and work.

Thanks!

PS: I'm openning the same thread for gamepad controller support

[Red]

I think Marson's UI adds the ability to drag abilities on the hotbar to another spot on the hotbar. It's glitchy (I've had the Rod of Recall dissappear more times than I care to remember) but it's much better than constant right clicking and working through menus to organize abilities. That seems like the perfect kind of thing for touch screens.

[0player]

Red, the ability to drag icons around on the hotbar has been vanilla even before 1.0 came around, I think.
More to the point, as someone who plays a lot with their mouse, i don't think a lot of additional considerations would be needed for touchpasds. Perhaps better gesture or multitap support for convenience bolt spam?

[Parcae2]

That was my initial reaction, but then I reconsidered. A touch UI needs to have bigger buttons (since fingers are less precise than a mouse) while at the same time including more stuff (to replace keyboard shortcuts) and being optimized for a smaller screen. In other words, it needs to be more efficient in its use of space.

Suggestions:

Make a list of everything that isn't absolutely needed in the current UI. All the stuff in the bottom right should go; it's too small to be usable by fingerpoke in any case. The top left can be de-cluttered too.

Have a Look button in the toolbar to simulate "mouseover" mode.

Pull from the side for basic functions, e.g. pull from the left to bring up an options/save/quit menu, and pull from the bottom to swap toolbars. People will be doing that a lot more since they will have a smaller toolbar and no room for a second row.

Tap the minimap to autoexplore, maybe? The old right-click to go to an area will probably be too imprecise with clumsy fingers and a tiny map.

Above all: remember that some people have external keyboards, and let them make use of them!

I'm very excited about this. Tome is the only reason I bother to boot up my old laptop instead of my spiffy new tablet.

[Planetus]

Maybe fill the bottom with 'tab' menus, so you can select one tab (maybe Options, Character, and Talents, anything else?) and run around with that tab's options available across the bottom/side/top/wherever in large-ish buttons. So maybe you'd get 5-10 talents and a scroll button, or a few Options menus to open, or various Character menus to open (character screen, level up, inventory, drop, etc). Most people would probably run with the talents quickslots active most of the time.

[freetard]

Yea I just started using touchpads, and before I wouldn't have thought much difference than mouse, but after playing some other roguelikes, including tome and a nethack port...
The big deal is in touchpad on smaller displays at least, you can't expect the same precision.
I think it will be very difficult to expect a player to essentially hit a tile with finger all the time. And I think with how roguelikes can have so much going wrong, and only 1-2 ways out alive, I can really see how I under appreciated my mouse's precision.
I think doing feedback-while-touched but not rumble just have it "pop-up" and maybe highlight blue it or something so you know what you're clicking before choosing targets and using an ability.
Also you should probably do less skill bars, and just have an easy way to rotate through multiples, like a static page button.
The main reason for less skill bars, I think, is put noticed enemies, and perhaps items, as pop-out tabs that essentially aliases to their entities, and can be touched instead. Combat in a roguelike tablet when fully surrounded can be tough unless you have player use keyboard -----
and I strongly hope you guys can figure out a solution that doesn't make use of software-keyboard on the devices. I do think support should of course be on hardware (or if user insists) as well as mouse support. Ideally I think one could play this unconnected to keyboard, with little changes to keep layout clean for touch. Plug in keyboard&mouse, and if the player so wishes, interface goes to our desktop tome setup, with little or no hassle.
I do think though if a serious roguelike went to tablet or phone it would need an interface change, rethinking most likely many things.(entities in game cannot be clicked for any reason. Targetting is done by choosing action, then enemies are highlighted one by one as player taps anywhere on screen but X button. When correct target, hold finger down anywhere. And with ground targets, or probably all targets, think about using a way perhaps of zooming into an area of interest without completely replacing the rest of map. and even with ground, the thought of hitting tiles still gives me nightmares on those things. I would almost think for things like that and movement put a transparant number pad that can be moved itself after long-finger-down, especially if doing something like making entities unclickable (you could still run into them for melee, and from experience most of the time if crowded instead of zooming image with fingers, and tapping them all, I would just give up half my screen for a inscreen keyboard so I could get past them and turn off the keyboard.
touch screen can also be more benefit to some interfaces. Unfortunately tome comes from an ideology of no interface lol.
but for example, a button for walking to a direction a set number of times. instead of making it bring up a dialog asking for a number, just have it display a number that increases if tapped, decreases if double-tap, and resets if held down. if you use a move button and that has a number on it, move that many and reset it.
Or basically confirm each action user takes. That could be done in a way I think that isn't much more in the way that requiring an additional click after target, if done well.
I think it would be amazing if tome got onto a portable though, and this is a fun topic for me :)

[Call]

I am excited about this. I have been trying to play the 1.3b2 on an 8" windows tablet and... It's an adventure. The touch screen only seems to have click, drag and right click functions. I couldn't figure out how to move the hotbar but I could resize it! Changing options was challenging as touching the name of an option toggled its value. The portrait screen makes various dialog boxes corrupt in their layout.

This is a Lenovo Tablet 8 with a 1200x1920 screen so I figured it would run it nicely, but it seems to scale up and think the resolution is a lot lower than it really is. I run it in a window mode so I can use the on screen keyboard.

Cheers!

[Charlie_B]

I play with a touch interface about half of the time, using my HP Spectre hybrid. While you could make major UI changes to accommodate a new interface I think for the most part it works fine and only tweaks are needed. Then again, my mindset is that I'm 'making it work' rather then playing the game as it's supposed to be played so perhaps other people would be frustrated by things that don't matter to me, such as long-press > inventory rather than the I key, or using 'mouse' gestures to e.g. autoexplore. Parcae2's sugestions sound useful.

Touch is so much better in a number of ways - particularly pressing on enemies to attack or places to move to feels far more intuitive and immersive than using a mouse. Unfortunately it is also fundamentally broken in a few key ways that lead to me having to break out the keyboard.

One issue is the inventory. Comparing items is difficult, and there doesn't seem to be a way to view the stats of what you're currently wearing without taking it off?

Another problem is scroll bars. They don't work at all for me whether or not I'm playing touch, but with a keyboard I can use arrow keys instead. This becomes a particular problem in the levelup screen when it can be impossible to access certain talents (especially those that start greyed out).

I'll come back to this as I play when I come across game-breaking problems.

[maanur]

I play ToME4 on my windows tablet and extremely lack any means of scrolling the map.

[Chronosplit]

This is old, but I think the Steam Deck has given us a chance to look at gamepad and touch controls with a fresh perspective. We now have a commonly accessible means of testing both at the same time to see what works (though some graphic effect details don't show up but that's another story). "Delf's Sensible Steam Deck Layout for Default Controls" is definitely worth looking into, and moreso would be able to be replicated to a major degree in a mobile version: a joystick/touch dpad for movement/bump attacks, buttons for auto-run and rest, and the touch interface can deal with hotkeys and targeting (much like how the mousepads deal with it on the Deck, where one enters a hotkey and the other works as a normal mouse). There are two main hurdles however:

1. Screen space. The controls actually have a sort of fix for the lack of hotkey spaces on a deck, where you can easily scroll through them with the left joystick, however I believe there are other ways around this. A lot of games have a skill wheel that works as an extra quick hotkey bar, but some classes are going to need a LOT more than a few spaces.

2. There are some buttons I much desired to set to back paddles. Namely going up/down stairs, inventory, and the level up screen. These can easily have a button in a touch screen layout.