Hi all!
Some members of the team have taken their vacation time this week, some took last week off, and some are taking next week off, so this period might be a bit slower in terms of interesting design blog posts and patches. We do have a patch coming today with some smaller/easier fixes and a memory optimization, but next week will probably go without one.
Since my time has mostly been spent on working on gamepad support, I can at least talk about how that’s going.
A lot of our UI code was written with a mouse and keyboard in mind. We’re fairly tooltip heavy and that’s presenting an interesting challenge. My mindset for implementing gamepads was always to do it so it feels natural to control the game with it. Obviously this is a bit tricky if most of the code was done with a mouse in mind instead of a gamepad. In particular, we wanted the game to be fully controllable with only the mouse and not require the keyboard, so UX wise, everything is done to respond to a single button press at a specific point on the screen.
When talking about being able to control the game with just the mouse, you’re expecting only one, maybe two, buttons to exist. UI interactions are usually intuitive for people in this day and age, so relying on just the left mouse button coupled with its point on the screen is enough to drive the entire game.
For gamepads, this obviously doesn’t work the same. If you’re using a gamepad, you can likely expect the player to be able to use all of it’s buttons. Gamepads also don’t really have a screen point they are directly interacting with like the mouse has, and even if they do, moving that point is much harder/different/annoying. Our first temporary implementation (which is currently available if you want to play with it) does exactly that: it moves the virtual mouse position with the left stick, and uses the A(xbox) or X(ps) button to emulate the left mouse button click. This is fine for now, but that’s not how a gamepad user expects to control the game.
So I went through every screen in the game and looked at it with my gamepad in hand and thought about how I’d control that screen with a gamepad. Jumping between UI options, jumping across Spells, toggling between UI mode and book/node/core/fight modes. With that plan in mind, I started looking at the code to see how to split the control into “this is when you’re using a gamepad” and “this is when you’ve got a mouse”. The whole process requires a fair bit of refactoring, but is on a good trajectory to be done for the next major patch.
Thanks for reading! Join our Discord server!
MarkoP