Keyboard Layout for Small Android Phones

[RedGem]

I've tried the android port of DCSS, but it was very hard to play on my phone.

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:

base.jpg (81.57 KiB) Viewed 5146 times

This keyboard is to be overlaid on the game screen.

2.png (143.73 KiB) Viewed 5143 times

(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.

example 1.jpg (134.04 KiB) Viewed 5146 times

*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.

[tompliss]

I play on my android phone nearly every day, and I think my main problem with it is moving around.
There is a port of another roguelike (an Angband one, I think), where you have access to the 9 directions (counting the '.' too) by applying a 3x3 grid on the map screen, and it's very efficient.
I think this is what would be the major improvement now, as the situations that are the most dangerous are combats where you want to go to a specific place or attack a spefici enemy...

[varsovie]

Don't forget tablet, If you put the arrows all over the screen, it gonna be a pain on a 10" screen.

[RedGem]

Maybe I didn't explain my idea properly.

1. There must be a toggle switch for the current mouse-based mode and this new keyboard mode. (*M/K Mode button I mentioned above)
Actually this should replace the current [Aa] button which opens android keyboard.
Therefore tablet users would easily be able to turn this keyboard off.

2. Since the keyboard pages should be remappable, you can fix some frequently-used keys(i.e. assign some keys on same spot in different pages). Here's an example.
In these two pages, Num keys are fixed so that they can be used conveniently.

ex3.jpg (104.1 KiB) Viewed 5050 times

ex4.jpg (108.17 KiB) Viewed 5050 times

[galehar]

2. Easy to program.

Patches welcome!

[RedGem]

I'm sorry I said that.

Actually it is not easy for me since I'm not a programmer. I should have said easier, not easy.

I should ask someone else to do the programming.

I didn't mean to make light of how hard the programming work is.

[johlstei]

Consolidating some buttons for a small keyboard mode would probably be for the best as well. No need to have [q]uaff, [r]ead, [e]at, e[V]oke be separate buttons if that means wasting 4 precious keyboard tiles. [P]ut on/[W]ear/[w]ield could be similarly combined, and perhaps also merge [R]emove/[T]akeoff into that. One would probably want to make judicious use of spell hotkeys on a phone, I think allowing for that is probably better than any spell interface improvements.

Honestly I think the best way to play phone crawl is currently the ascii version over ssh, so I guess I'd want a "full" android keyboard specific to crawl? Some combos are going to be really fiddly on a touchscreen no matter what.

[Grinoldy]

Please. Add. This. I'm begging you

[ZTO]

I've been playing the Android version for almost 2 years. I play in ASCII on a samsung galaxy S4 and I think the interface works well enough, for the most part. The only real barrier to entry was the lack of documentation regarding the touch controls (touching the direction on the screen to go that direction and touching in the center to rest) to get around. It took me a while to notice that but it made it a billion times easier to play. My only other gripe is that the tab key is only one, err, tile? wide, the same as every other letter. Normally wouldn't be a problem but I've definitely wasted some piety by accidentally moving over juussstt a little bit while tabbing through an enemy and hit "a a" instead of "tab tab". Other than that, I think it's a pretty accessible port and I appreciate the dev work that allows me to play at work!

[scorpionwarrior]

If you're ok with playing online (and ascii), you can use Connectbot and a transparent keyboard, it works pretty well for me.

[rkd2003]

I'm sorry I said that.

Actually it is not easy for me since I'm not a programmer. I should have said easier, not easy.

I should ask someone else to do the programming.

I didn't mean to make light of how hard the programming work is.

how about that?
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=13481&p=187651&hilit=android#p187651



Just cover dcss tiles over that android ascii version like first image.