Mouse support, and accessibility

Tchey · 2020-08-05 06:53:25

Hi,

I think in the long term, you might have to deal with mouse support.
More options, more controls, more things to do, keyboard will show some limitation.

It’s already not very easy or friendly to select a unit and to give order to go somewhere off screen, and that’s just with a few units involved.
Same with moving the map around. Sure you can zoom out, move, zoom in, but it takes a while and it’s not very precise neither.

Also it’s faster and easier to look around with the mouse, simply looking at different tiles to show the tooltips, etc

I’m all for full keyboard support, but "+ optional mouse" would be nice.

I’m used to play keyboard only, and "true" roguelikes, for many years, but i’m an "expert gamer". By no means a good one, but i’m 40 and i’ve been playing since forever, and a lot of "weird ugly games". However, the more i communicate about video games as a hobby, the more i see people not playing games i enjoy a lot, because of accessibility issue. Bad GUI, bad mouse support, key rebinding, sound and visual options for everything etc. It’s not even about having high tech 3D GPU killer, but more about "general settings", if it makes sense.

Darin · 2020-08-05 15:12:12

I agree with you there. I want to make the game much more accessible in the future, allowing custom keybindings, and for people to change the coloring is a start, I think.

For moving large distances, what do you think about this feature?
-You could use your mouse to hover over the mini-map at the bottom left of the screen
-When your mouse is over the mini-map, it expands to fill most of the screen
-If you click on the enlarged map you are taken there

It won't be as easy as point-and-click that you can do in other games by just clicking somewhere on the mini-map--what I'm suggesting is two steps instead of one, but I don't think clicking directly on the sub-map will be accurate enough since it fundamentally can't have that much of a resolution in text-mode.

Things like moving the cursor to the edge of the screen I'd support too, but with larger maps that still isn't enough.

Funnily enough, earlier in the game's development I had some limited mouse support. I ended up dropping it along time ago though because I thought people wouldn't care. I guess I was wrong on that point!

Tchey · 2020-08-05 17:59:47

Not sure about the minimap going big, then click to go.
What about a minimap size toggle ?
Just click the minimap once (or use a key) to make it larger, like 1/4 of the corner
If you want you can still play with the mini-big-map, or you could click again to jump the camera.

Darin · 2020-08-05 18:32:48

I suppose I'm concerned that for larger map sizes it wouldn't be enough resolution and would need to take up most of the screen to be useful. I guess, as almost always, a good solution to choosing parameters like this is just to set some reasonable default and have the setting changeable by a config file.

Darin · 2020-09-11 01:49:10

Limited mouse support is working in the to-be-released v0.2.0 of the game. I added mouse support for the menu and click-and-drag to draw zones.

Unfortunately, it seems just about every terminal emulator on Linux does something slightly differently in reporting mouse events which makes click-and-drag detection difficult or in some cases impossible in certain setups.

I have it working exactly like I want on Konsole, but gnome-terminal, for example click-and-drag is broken. Also, Windows is an entirely different story.

I'm still working on it, but I'm starting to think it may not be realistic to support and attempt to detect these idiosyncrasies. Instead, I'm thinking I may provide multiple versions of the game:

1) Using SDL (like Dwarf Fortress and other games do, I believe, where the game is rendered [with images of letters] in full graphics mode). The advantage is that mouse support may be more reliable, due to SDL which I suspect handles the mouse better.

2) Using ncurses dynamically linked -- the advantage that it will be actual text mode run in a terminal emulator. Mouse support will probably be hit or miss, with Konsole likely working correctly, since I use and test on it the most.

3) Using ncurses statically linked without any mouse support. The advantage is that this should run on the largest variety of Linux distros and configurations, old and new.

I'm guessing a lot of people won't really care if the game is run literally in a terminal emulator or not and may just use option (1).

Tchey · 2020-09-11 07:55:52

I’m the first to NOT care about the game running inside a true terminal, or within an engine or something else.

Whatever serves the game and accessibility.

Arcane Fortune Forums

#1 2020-08-05 06:53:25

Mouse support, and accessibility

#2 2020-08-05 15:12:12

Re: Mouse support, and accessibility

#3 2020-08-05 17:59:47

Re: Mouse support, and accessibility

#4 2020-08-05 18:32:48

Re: Mouse support, and accessibility

#5 2020-09-11 01:49:10

Re: Mouse support, and accessibility

#6 2020-09-11 07:55:52

Re: Mouse support, and accessibility

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