Touch pad clicking too difficult

[Chazar]

Since scrolling by dragging was enabled on touch devices, it has become very difficult for me to execute a normal click (i.e. to select a unit, or select a destination for a selected unit on the map, etc.). This makes it near impossible to play on my Android Nexus 10, since basic clicks are, well, pretty basic and important.

I tried long and short presses, and double clicks. Somehow I manage to select something eventually, but it takes ages. So I no longer even try to make my turn on a tablet device.

While it is nice to be able to scroll the big map view through dragging, primary clicks are way more important. I think that drag&drop is a known problem for touch devices, so I would guess that finding a cure that works across all devices is known to be a very difficult problem. Hence I would suggest at least an option to 1) disable drag & drop and 2) show four arrow buttons underneath the normal game buttons on the right hand side (i.e. move,defend,etc.) that scroll the map view around. That ought to be a very simple thing to do, and it is pretty much guaranteed to work too.

[Chazar]

Here is what I see on my tablet in Portrait mode. There is a lot of wasted screen space on the lower right where four simple scrolling buttons could be placed:

Tablet View

WarTablet3.jpg (154.16 KiB) Viewed 5488 times

As I wrote earlier, Landscape mode is impossible to use, since dialog boxes (like hero offers, ingame-messages, etc.) are displayed much bigger than the screen, so that it is impossible to close them (you cannot zoom out nor move them either). So once such a window is opened, you need to reload. Furthermore, the map is zommed in even bigger, just displaying 9 tiles width, which is less than portrait mode's 10 tiles any way.

[piranha]

This is great information for us. One question, what happens if the pad in in landscape mode when you click the link to the game. Still same thing? Can you take a picture of that as well?

I'm working on the interface that we will use on phones, and I will work on tablet interface after.
Snotling has done some work on speeding up the mapscroll and will continue doing that and make sure that you can click and drag without problem.
We have to do a lot of refactoring to make the game possible as a native app using the WebView which we are also doing now. Hopefully it will give some performance boost in the standard browser version too.

About the click/drag problem, it would be good to solve that already now to make it possible to play even if the interface is not optimal as you say. We can take a look this week if we can find a solution, it would be great if you can do some tests on your pad after we update. It seems that the click / drag problem occur on android and not iOS from our very limited testing.

[Chazar]

First of all: I always had the device in Portrait or Landscape before clicking on the game link. Turning the device afterwards is possible, but zooms in even more (photos follow in next post).

So here are the photos when loading in Landscape mode.

Dialog boxes are huge, and one cannot move them around to see all of it, which is annoying. In this instance, I could scroll down to the OK button to continue, but sometimes I have problems doing that. Furthermore it is impossible to scroll to the little x in the top right corner to the dismiss the box, so in some games it is near impossible to close a dialog:

LandscapeDialog

WBland1.jpg (114.47 KiB) Viewed 5471 times

In landscape mode, one has to scroll, which is pretty difficult, since you need to find a spot where dragging does not drag the map view. Here is the upper half:

LandscapeUpperHalf

WBland2.jpg (189.75 KiB) Viewed 5471 times

Here is the lower half now. Since landscape mode zooms in even more, showing much less map tiles than portrait mode, I prefer portrait.
Your graphics are really nice, but I really want to see a lot of map tiles at once to get a good overview over my battlefield.

LandscapeLowerHalf

WBland3.jpg (139.34 KiB) Viewed 5471 times

[Chazar]

Landscape mode, lower half, forcing Warbarons' highres mode by editing the corresponding GET-parameter "res=highres" within my browser's URL entry field:

LandscapeHighres

WBlandHighres.jpg (194.33 KiB) Viewed 5471 times

For completeness, here is Warbarons, highres, loading in portrait mode and then turning it to landscape mode, scrolled down to the lower-mid-part of the screen:

Portrait turned Landscape later

WB_p2l.jpg (143.08 KiB) Viewed 5471 times

And here the other way around, i.e. loading in landscape mode and then turning it to portrait mode:

Landscape turned Portrait later

WB_l2p.jpg (218.22 KiB) Viewed 5471 times

[Chazar]

PS: In the second batch of pictures, I had grid enabled throughout to make it easier to count how many map tiles are shown (so the black lines are no bug, but a feature).

About the click problem: I should add that I always see a reaction, but it is almost always interpreted as dragging. So klicking in the map to set a destination for a unit will just scroll the map view by a tiny amount. Clicking on a button on the right hand side (e.g. next unit, move unit, etc.) will turn that button blue (i.e. select it, which usually happens by dragging over text or holding-over-text).

So maybe the problem is really high resolution of 2560x1600, which makes it impossible to execute a click on a single pixel?

Well, admittedly, I don't know much about touch devices, but I would guess that while the touch-resolution is much worse than the actual screen resolution, the device will probably turn touch coordinates into screen-pixel coordinates before handing them over to an application?! So any attempt of my big finger trying to hit a single spot will result in the device reporting a short line to the browser application, which apparently is long enough for Warbarons to interpret as a dragging operation?

[SnotlinG]

Hello Chazar,

As I understand it, the main problem is that you try to make a click on the main map, and it is interpereted as a very short dragging? Is this correct?

Thanks!

[Chazar]

the main problem is that you try to make a click on the main map, and it is interpereted as a very short dragging? Is this correct?

Yes.

However:

• Not just only the main map, but everywhere in warbarons! So even clicking on the buttons on the left and right hand side of the screen does not work. I see the button press animation, but the game does not register/execute the click. Instead, the button's text or graphic is highlighted with a blue background (i.e. text selection).
• The problem exists since v0.91, older v0.9 work fine.

[SnotlinG]

I have tried to make a fix on the code. I have some issues testing it though since I only have an android phone which apparently is bugish with touch-drag.

If you load your game again (a version 0.91 game), and then edit the URL and replace game.php with touchgame.php, and let me know if you experience any difference?

Thanks!

[Chazar]

At first, it seems to work very good...

...but then, the old behaviour comes back. Weird.

Here is the behaviour that I see in detail, and I could reproduce it every time (i.e. reloadind and ensuring touchgame.php was loaded):

The first click for selecting a unit works immediately. Setting a path for this unit works also quite good. Even changing the destination multiples times, and dragging the map in between works just fine.

However, the buttons on the right are still very difficult to use. Even worse, once I got a button like "deselect (x)" or "next-unit (n)" to work, selecting a destination by clicking on the map no longer works - path setting becomes as difficult as with game.php before. Weird.