Mines Malingerer
Posts: 30
Joined: Friday, 22nd November 2013, 22:01
Keyboard Layout for Small Android Phones
I've heard that there are some ongoing updates about zoom in/out and bigger icons for this matter.
https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5644&hilit=android+ui&start=50#p82496
However, I have a different idea on this : not using mouse actions at all.
I don't use mouse at all when I play the game with my PC, and I think it's possible to make it same with the android port.
We can use whole screen to be a keyboard if we disable the mouse action.
So, here's the deal. I assume at least 4 * 7 = 28 buttons are reliably usable on common android phones these days.
This is what we have now:
This keyboard is to be overlaid on the game screen.
(This is what I see on my phone. I tried the SDL functions but it was not good enough. )
Now, 28 keys are not enough for playing crawl. We use alphabets(26), numbers(10), marks(11) and some more when we play the game with PC.
So what we need is keyboard pages, about 3~5 of them, all of which are remappable.
Here's an example of a keyboard page I'd like.
*M/K mode: Mouse Mode / Keyboard Mode
This would make the game playable in smaller phones.
There are several benefits compared to zooming/mouse action mode.
1. Being able to see wide map without zooming in or out.
2. Easy to program.
3. Easy to customize.