Support for keypad input, e.g. Smartphones

Hi,

So I am designing a game in Visionaire with a group of friends. I have been fiddling with the engine and trying to come up with mechanics that would extend the possibilites of the player regarding puzzle solving. The mechanic I got implemented now is that when the player clicks on an object, he is presented with a list of actions he can take. I did this in order to escape the usual cursor interface; to kinda give the player a more direct choice in text "USE FORCE ON DOOR" etc. Although this is completely doable and already works, I think it lacks something. So I was thinking, what if the player would have to input every action by himself, through the use of a keypad? (A bit like in the old Larry games, but not quite) I mean, I could do an interface to represent the keypad and the player would need to click his choice with his mouse, but this seems counter-intuitive. If we were to design our game to the smartphone, would it be possible to insert commands using the keypad? While making the game, I could prototype it by building an interface that combines with the PC keyboard to input every command.

Quick Example:
Player clicks on door -> "It's a door" -> Keypad opens -> Player writes "Open" -> "It's locked" -> Keypad opens -> Player writes "Force" -> "I smashed the door open"

Any ideas?

Yes technically it's possible. There is actually a key event system already implemented into the editor itself (as you are probably already aware) but there is also a Lua script key event listener/handler too that was implemented for Visionaire Studio 4.x. The Lua version would save a lot of time in comparison to setting up the in-editor version of your text handler.

It would be quite complicated to setup though as it would require you to create lots of tables, lots & lots of tables in which you would add the required text input options that are available for each object or action. Daunting no?

I'm not going to give you a step by step on how to implement this as it would take me a right age to explain. Plus a lot of it would be theoretical explanation. I have created a template a while back using the editor key actions - before the Lua script version was available - but that thing took me almost 3 days to setup. What you are talking about would probably take a lot longer as the things I made was just a small quiz with an if then else query system to check if correct answer was provided.


Here's the template I made. It's not plug & play though. It is purely for reference.

Thanks alot, I'll look into it. Perhaps it's a bit too daunting, but until I come up with a better mechanic to dodge the standard cursor action formula that restricts the player to certain actions, I'll probably be inserting my tables. Or perhaps there's some other way of tricking the player to think he has more options, and I just haven't come up with it yet.

Apparently the devs are working on implementing some mobile gesture based actions (I think) into an upcoming build of the engine.

The best interface for cross-platform support would be the single command interface. Basically 1 command for left click interaction. Right click is already included by default as an available action & could be used for observation of items. I think equivalent of right click on a phone is touch & hold no? I'm not sure though as I don't bother with mobile phones or tablets. I have a windows phone but about all it gets used for is as an alarm clock.