This is the christmas issue of the iPhone / iPod touch programming tips. This time we deal with the touch interface. The main challenge I found with the touch screen support is that it is hard to use it to track for example forward / backward / left / right and fire at the same time. Let's say the user presses fire and then he presses forward, what happens when he accidentally slides his finger a bit?
The problem is that each event is defined by the region it happens on the screen. When the user slides his finger, he is leaving this region. In other words if you handle on-screen touches as touch is on and finger lifted is off, if the finger is moved away and then lifted, the event is still on.
The work around is that if the user slides away with his finger the previous location of this finger is used to check if the current location is in the even region. If it is not, it defaults to switch off.
Touch-screen support for a typical shooter might work like this:
In touchesBegan, touchesMoved and touchesEnd there is a function call like this:
// Enumerates through all touch objects
for (UITouch *touch in touches)
{
[self _handleTouch:touch];
touchCount++;
}
_handleTouch might look like this:
- (void)_handleTouch:(UITouch *)touch
{
CGPoint location = [touch locationInView:self];
CGPoint previousLocation;
// if we are in a touchMoved phase use the previous location but then check if the current
// location is still in there
if (touch.phase == UITouchPhaseMoved)
previousLocation = [touch previousLocationInView:self];
else
previousLocation = location;
...
// fire event
// lower right corner .. box is 40 x 40
if (EVENTREGIONFIRE(previousLocation))
{
if (touch.phase == UITouchPhaseBegan)
{
// only trigger once
if (_bitMask ^ Q3Event_Fire)
{
[self _queueEventWithType:Q3Event_Fire value1:K_MOUSE1 value2:1];
_bitMask|= Q3Event_Fire;
}
}
else if (touch.phase == UITouchPhaseEnded)
{
if (_bitMask & Q3Event_Fire)
{
[self _queueEventWithType:Q3Event_Fire value1:K_MOUSE1 value2:0];
_bitMask^= Q3Event_Fire;
}
}
else if (touch.phase == UITouchPhaseMoved)
{
if (!(EVENTREGIONFIRE(location)))
{
if (_bitMask & Q3Event_Fire)
{
[self _queueEventWithType:Q3Event_Fire value1:K_MOUSE1 value2:0];
_bitMask^= Q3Event_Fire;
}
}
}
}
...
Tracking if the switch is on or off can be done with a bit mask. The event is send off to the game with a separate _queueEventWithType method.
Hi, I was reading through your blog -- you're doing some cool stuff! One comment regarding this post:
ReplyDeleteI came up with some of these APIs when I was at Apple. UITouch/UIEvent/UIResponder make multitouch event tracking much easier than this. What you want to do is retain the touches during -touchesBegan: and compare them to the touches passed to -touchesMoved: and -touchesEnded:. Here is an example of how I might structure an FPS control scheme with move on the left and look on the right. This is just pseudocode, it's missing the actual FPS parts and it probably doesn't compile ;-)
Code snippet here
If you do it this way, then it becomes much easier to track touches that might slip outside controls' bounds.
Hope you find this information useful & keep up the great work!