Greetings and salutations!
This week's screenshot shows further progress on operating menus without a mouse:
The work of the week just past was once again focussed almost entirely on non-mouse operation of the game's menu-systems:
In general, the system has been significantly expanded and refined (and in places reworked). It's a bit clunky, I'll confess, but it seems to work, and to work rather better than it did last week. It's not quite done, but I think that it's getting there.
Indeed, a great number of changes and fixes were made during the week just past, primarily on non-mouse menu-operation, but also on one or two other things. Some proved challenging, if not really troublesome (such as handling the navigation of dialogues), while others proved quite easy, as I recall. In total there are rather too many for me to want to list them all, so let me just mention two that proved troublesome:
One thing that's proven tricky is the mouse. Simply put, the mouse-cursor remains active even when using input from another device. Thus when navigation brings a UI-element beneath the mouse, the mouse may be seen as having "entered" that UI-element, potentially firing off events and so interfering with navigation. I have some fixes in place via a "mouse-mode" variable, but it's imperfect, and even given that it is so, there's more to be done, I think.
Another problem has been the question of convenient operation of tabs: I have a few menus that contain multiple tabbed pages, and it would be nice to be able to switch back and forth at a button-press, regardless of the currently-selected item.
The underlying functionality of this is fairly straightforward, I think, and was implemented without any real trouble in the week just past, as I recall.
The question, however, is that of what buttons to use. I gather that many games use the gamepad's left- and right- shoulder-buttons for this purpose. But what of players using other devices? And how does this interact with control-mapping? Furthermore, I currently have the "examine" action on one of those shoulder-buttons, and that action has its own use in certain menus.
For now, I have an idea that I'll likely explore--but it does mean adding two more controls to the key-mapper list...
That, then, is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
