[SUGGESTION] Touchscreen UI and Control

Hello all. Now i know it's not a simple task to develop a full touchscreen UI for a game, especially rts.

i recently bought a Microsoft surface pro 3, and it's great. I can actually play PA on it, but with a keyboard that is awkward to use, and a trackpad.

I've thought about making a mod but i have no idea where to start for this one. (if anyone knows i would love to hear it!)

Anyway i'm hoping someone can share their own thoughts on this, i know there are more people that use touchscreens these days (obviously not for gaming, just in general)

Also, i'm hoping someone else has a surface so it doesn't look like i'm asking for a personal feature.

I can help test it, my PC also has a touchscreen. If you need it

i have no idea how to make a mod like this.

And YAY got someone who has a touchscreen on the first reply!

Me either, but I could help design a UI.

I have a windows 8 laptop, with touch as well- this could be fun.

I've always thought a touch interface makes sense for rts....

I got my eye on that new surface as well.

Is it just integrated Intel graphics? That makes it a tougher sell for me.

Anyways I have definitely thought about RTS UI on touch and the main issue is panning the view, say if you're designing an iOS game that's an RTS.

Luckily with the use of WASD on a keyboard or some other means of panning the view like a joystick, it should get a bit better, though now you've mostly only got one hand free to do the command gestures.

There will also really have to be special touch and multitouch gestures to get the most out of it though. Use of keyboard mappings as with WASD would fill the gap in the meantime.

Perhaps a perfect setup would be a secondary touchpad device which is simply mapped to always pan the view (e.g. as though middle click was held down), and it can be used as a dedicated scrolling/panning control surface. (Think Apple Magic Touchpad) Then theres no keys to hunt down, less fiddly than a joystick, and could be positioned right next to the main game screen.

TBH for something like PA trying to make it run on a tablet device will be painful and at best the tablet will just be hot to the touch the whole time. Better to set up Steam in-house streaming for low latency H.264 streamed gameplay. This will require some special protocol for dealing with the multitouch gestures, though.

Taking it further it might even be best to just keep everything the way it is, run the game on the desktop on its monitor, and have a tablet sensor that's like a Wacom but instead of giving you feedback on the position of the pen above the tablet, it does the same for your fingers. Nah, that's probably not something that exists, plus seeing the game on the tablet lets you actually touch your units.

Yes unfortunately they're only integrated graphics, but the i7 model runs HD5000, which is pretty darn good for this game.

I agree, it is pretty hot when playing PA, and the in home streaming actually is pretty nice.

Obviously i cant play without a KB and mouse since there is no gesture control, but just loading the planets and building a few units at the start is pretty cool for a tablet.

I can only imagine how cool it would be to play PA mobile. It is possible already, but lugging around a mouse and KB is just not practical.

There is already a software that makes ingame gestures, called GestureWorks Gameplay, but i don't feel like buying it

Anyway i'm hoping a modder can point me in the right direction for this, or i just hope Uber sees this and thinks 'what a great idea'

I don't have a touchscreen I'm afraid so I can't help there. Just a word of caution though, since I have an iPad and have tried RTS games on that ... you'll lose a *TON* of interactivity when using just a touchscreen! Losing all the keyboard shortcuts will slow you down massively unless you use an external keyboard as well (unless you add a load of buttons, but that eats into your screen real estate pretty fast).

In some ways a touchscreen is much, much nicer (zooming, rotating, scrolling, dragging), but I reckon you'll still want the keyboard as well. Still, if someone builds something can you make sure you include trackpad integration (specially Apple Trackpads!!)?

I don't want to be 'that guy,' but i don't even use hotkeys on my pc and i'm ranked 16 on pastats.

For me, hotkeys are not a large problem.

I actually played a game on my surface pro with steam in home streaming... i have to admit it looks very nice. I played with only a wireless mouse, and it was fabulous. Now i just want those mouse commands morphed into touch gestures.

@Aliessil you bring up a great point with the lack of hotkeys and I was real big on using Hotbuild2 but recently it has been getting buggier with the latest changes from Uber and I have been playing PA with no hotkeys... though i never play competitively, its usually just GW singleplayer so this hardly means anything, but definitely the ability to queue stuff up helps to reduce the APM requirement for this particular game (PA).

For a tablet RTS game it definitely requires some thoughtful design to make the game experience a good one.

Think about how control on a touch device can all be contextual. Soft buttons, contextual UI and commands. This is an area of UX that we have barely scratched the surface of.

Boop.