Android input controls (SOLVED)

Questions
1

I am working on a platformer, so i want the four basics of left,right up and down on the left of the screen. Also, i want two buttons on the right.

I saw that are a lot of examples using mouse and keys triggers, but couldn’t find any using touch triggers.

*Can you point me to any example that uses touch triggers?
*When testing touch triggers, is it necessary to deploy on mobile first, or can we test the trigger by click on mouse for example?

2

When you configure left mouse button it doubles as single touch on mobile.

Have a look at this multi-touch example for virtual touch pad input: https://github.com/britzl/publicexamples/tree/master/examples/virtual_gamepad

3

I tried to do something simple, so here is what i did. Of course my solution is simplified version of what @britzl provided me. The idea is to setup a mouse click input, and then make sure that a touch/click have occurred at that position.

Here is what i did:

  • I have created an input of Mouse_Button_1 with action “touch”
  • I created a three files:
    - “gui.atlas”. This file contains all the assets need for the android controls.
    - “globalgui.gui”. This is my gui object. Inside, i have created four nodes. A node for each control movement. Also, i have created a texture which was mapped to the atlas. Each node created has the Texture property which should be be mapped to its target asset in the texture-atlas.
    - Don’t forget that you need to position the nodes correctly.
    - “globalgi.gui_script”. This is the gui script which communicates between player script and the gui nodes.

This is the my gui script.:

function init(self)
	msg.post(".", "acquire_input_focus")
end

function on_message(self, message_id, message, sender)
    -- check if we received a contact point message
    if message_id == hash("register") then
    	self.listener = sender
    end
end

local function post_to_listener(self, message_id, message)
	if self.listener then
		msg.post(self.listener, message_id, message or {})
	end
end

function final(self)
	msg.post(".", "release_input_focus")
end

function on_input(self, action_id, action)
	local id = nil
	if gui.pick_node(gui.get_node("box_up"), action.x, action.y) then
		id = hash("up")
	elseif gui.pick_node(gui.get_node("box_down"), action.x, action.y) then
		id = hash("down")
	elseif gui.pick_node(gui.get_node("box_left"), action.x, action.y) then
		id = hash("left")
	elseif gui.pick_node(gui.get_node("box_right"), action.x, action.y) then
		id = hash("right")
	end
	
	post_to_listener(self, hash("touch"), { actionid = id, actionobj = action })
end

In the player script, i detect the touch event in the on_message function:

if message_id == hash("touch") then
    	handle_input(self, message.actionid, message.actionobj)
    end

Thank you very much for you support.

1 Like