How to get your (Completed) game on Android & OUYA

custom buttons are cool. I'd totally customize it per game to fit in with a theme and have a better layout than "escape and enter" for it. Works for keyboard, but I can imagine it being a tad redundant for the android.

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dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
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I don't remember any d-pad problems. I think someone else mentioned it being too small, but that is possibly specific to the phone they were testing with.

I think that the best we can do with the controls is test it, and see how it works for any given game. I know that Bell of Chaos was actually pretty playable with the onscreen controls on my tablet, so I am optimistic that most (but certainly not all) non-RPG games will work okay.

What's that black space at the bottom due to? And how did you take that screenshot?

Don't you find that the d-pad needs a dead zone in the center? I found it quite difficult to use last time I tried (months ago).

The black space at the bottom is the menu bar where the Back, Home, and Process-list buttons appear. I believe that bar is standard for all Android devices >= 4.0 since they don't have physical versions of those buttons anymore. sdl-android does something to hide those buttons, but they are still there, and still clickable.

The bar stands out a lot in the screenshot, but when actually on the screen, the black area feels as if it isn't even part of the screen.

The trick to taking a screenshot on an Android device is to hold the Sleep button and the volume down button simultaneously for about one second.



I haven't noticed anything like that, but I still have not tested on a phone-sized device. All I have been testing with so far is 7 and 10 inch tablets.

Is there a way to move the d-pad and buttons to the top when a text box is at the bottom of the screen, or make it more transparent or temporarily invisible until the screen is touched? Otherwise I'll have to move most of my text boxes to the top of the screen to solve this.

the answer is currently no to both your questions.
Start moving.

Actually James recently added an option to the Platform Options menu called "Touch Textboxes" which causes the buttons to be hidden if there is a textbox onscreen. He might still be tinkering with it.

A way to have the buttons hide after a delay when the screen isn't being touched sounds like a good idea. Good for cutscenes. Would a script command to toggle visibility manually be a bad idea?

I am finished. For people who want to use this, open your game in the current nightly build, and then go to "Edit General Game Data" -> "Platform Specific Options" and then change "Touch Textboxes" to "YES".

It will hide the controls on all textboxes *except* ones with choice boxes, or ones that are displayed at the same time as a menu.



Yeah, maybe commands like "suspend virtual gamepad" and "resume virtual gamepad" I kinda hate the idea of making people micro-manage the virtual gamepad, but I can't think of any other way to do it.

The hide delay thing reminds me of something. In long cutscenes, like the intro to Motrya, some devices will go to powersave and blank the screen. I searched around in the sdl-android code and I could not find anything to suppress that behavior.

Downloaded both the zip and install exe and couldn't find the Touch Textboxes option on either.

Uh oh! Looking at the dates on those files, it appears that the nightlies have not been building for a month. I'll see if I can figure out what is wrong...


EDIT: Okay, the nightly wip builds are fixed. You can re-download now.

Nice, expect me to bug you with a new version of Kane to compile tonight!

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

But wait, are we talking about two different things, disabling the controls, or just hiding them? (For example if a game switches between mouse/touch based controls and gamepad/keyboard controls)



Seems straight forward:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5331152/correct-method-for-setkeepscreenon-flag-keep-screen-on

Hmm.... well, in the current implementation, hiding and disabling the virtual gamepad are exactly the same thing. I guess that hiding without disabling could be possible... but it also seems like it could be confusing if you had to press a button and the buttons are invisible.

I am not aware of any existing games that mix mouse and keyboard control.

Thanks for the link on FLAG_KEEP_SCREEN_ON I can give that a try :)

Would it be possible to adjust the touch screen controls to let the player touch choices and commands and battle targets, rather than having to use the d-pad to navigate through everything?

That was the original plan, and I hope still is the plan (and walking about the map by clicking too). But it'll be quite a lot of work (but James has started on user menus), since each built-in menu will need to be updated separately (and practically requires first converting them to either slices or the new menu system, which is even more time consuming).