I am working on an app for small kids. The app is basically an eye candy game where the kid can touch the screen and make flowers or balloons appear. I am using touchesBegan: and touchesend: to figure out when the kid is pressing down (start the animation) and when he lifts his finger up (stop the animation).
My problem is that, some of the kids I beta tested, with held the iPhone with their thumb on the screen. This extra touch messes with my logic that controls the position of the animation. I believe I can take care of this with one of two methods
setting exclusive touch so that once the first finger is down, all other touches are ignored, thus forcing the child to lift their thumb up if they want to make the game do anything.
by capturing the position of the touch begin and making sure that in my touch end logic, I am responding to the correct finger.
I was just curious if anyone else has run into this problem and if they had come up with a better approach.
I went with #1 "setting exclusive touch so that once the first finger is down, all other touches are ignored, thus forcing the child to lift their thumb up if they want to make the game do anything." I tested it with a few kids and very quickly they figured out what the "rules" were and adapted.
What age group? From observing 1-, 3-, and 5-year olds with touch screen phones, it seems to me that at the age where the child could be trusted to hold the phone and not drop it (late two or early three) they can learn how to hold the phone on a palm. The ones who need to grip can easily, after being shown only once in most cases, learn to grip with the thumb from the top and bottom areas where there is no screen.
I agree that your app should handle the errant input intelligently, but don't discount minimum instruction in the general use of the phone (holding it) first. This isn't a case of 'fix the user' but rather a skill that the user (the child) will need to use any app on the phone.
Related
I am trying to make a basic rhythm game in Godot, but with unique controls. A few years ago, I played a cool game called Fast Like a Fox. The controls were unique, because you tapped on the back of your device to move your character to move, not on the screen. I thought the controls were cool, and I want to try to replicate them in a simple one-button rhythm game for mobile. Does anyone know if it would be possible for Godot to take that kind of input, either in a built-in function or something else?
They read the accelerometer (and maybe other sensors), which Godot supports through accelerometer, gravity and gyroscope. Accelerometers are accurate enough to read passwords as they're being typed so you can even get a rough estimate on where the user is tapping, which is used in Fast Like a Fox use case where internally they poll the sensor and raise an event when particular changes happen in one or multiple axes. In your case, it might be enough to just treat any sudden changes as an event if you simply care about the user tapping anything.
Try writing an app that will display the delta of each axis measurement then tap your phone around, you'll figure it out. Remember to test on various conditions (device being held upside down while laying on a bed, sitting on a chair, laying on one's side, etc) since different axes will register the changes.
I am working on a tilemap based game in cocos2d in which the player moves in four directions and I have used four images for the movement of player for example left,right,top and down. My problem is that when my background map change its position or move to other position then my sprite does not change its position. Can anyone tell me how to move a sprite with the movement of background.
Use a CCNode to contain both the background and the sprites for your players. Instead of moving the background, move that node.
There are a couple of ways to handle tilemap based games, and neither of them are very convenient. One way is to leave your character in the center of the screen at all times and move the background underneath it. If your character moves 'right', you simply slide the background to the left, and vice versa. This will give the illusion that the character moves around the map, when in reality it remains centered. Under this paradigm you must remember to convert all detection / collisions into the world's space, and not just the screen space. If you don't convert everything, then your 'range' of collision / detection is limited to the size of the screen.
The second method is to pan the camera over the world. You still keep the character in the middle of the screen, but it actually moves around in the world, and the camera follows. This makes the most intuitive sense to me because it allows you to view the game world as you see the real world. It is also much easier to deal with collisions because the position of the character and the world 'just work' and don't have to be converted. The downside here is that Cocos2D doesn't make it easy to use CCCamera, and the documentation is a little thin in that respect.
In your particular case, it sounds like you have a CCLayer problem. If your character is inside the layer you are moving, it will indeed remain in the same place relative to the map (as you are describing). Instead, float the character in a different layer on top of the map.
You could use a scrolling Parallex and then add the sprite onto the same layer as the background. They will move together.
I'm creating a zombie preparedness app for iOS and I thought it would be cool to have an "Apocalypse mode" which is similar to Airplane mode in that it replaces the status bar carrier icon with a little airplane except possibly with a little mushroom cloud or something instead?
Apocalypse mode would just be a boolean flag in my app the disables all data connection required features (only within the app, not using any private APIs or anything...). If possible, I would still like to have the clock, battery life, Bluetooth icons and whatever else that pops up onto the status bar during normal operation.
I'm looking at the MTStatusBarOverlay library to implement this feature. Related (Stackoverflow post here). I know there is a possibility my app could get rejected for style because of this, but my thought is that I don't want to stray to far from the norm and cross my fingers Apple doesn't jump on me for it.
My question is
How can I copy over the clock and battery life icons? Do I need to hook into an event or is there a UI element I can add.
Am I going about this the right way? Would it be better to just make a transparent overlay on top of the normal status bar with a mushroom cloud that overlays the carrier icon instead of replacing the status bar entirely? I'm worried about variable length carrier icons...
Of course option 3 is I just forget that idea entirely and make some sort of different background or something for this mode, but that seems lame :P
I had a go with something similar a while ago. I created a status bar overlay that accepted touch events, but didn't block the status bar from receiving touches, which is crucial for app store acceptance.
You can check out my question and my answer, however keep in mind it might not be actual anymore, it worked great in iOS4, but never tested it on 5. Worth a try though.
As for the overlay itself, I suggest covering everything up to the clock, and leaving the rest transparent, it should do the job.
For the past few months I've been looking into developing a Kinect based multitouch interface for a variety of software music synthesizers.
The overall strategy I've come up with is to create objects, either programatically or (if possible) algorithmically to represent various controls of the soft synth. These should have;
X position
Y position
Height
Width
MIDI output channel
MIDI data scaler (convert x-y coords to midi values)
2 strategies I've considered for agorithmic creation are XML description and somehow pulling stuff right off the screen (ie given a running program, find xycoords of all controls). I have no idea how to go about that second one, which is why I express it in such specific technical language ;). I could do some intermediate solution, like using mouse clicks on the corners of controls to generate an xml file. Another thing I could do, that I've seen frequently in flash apps, is to put the screen size into a variable and use math to build all interface objects in terms of screen size. Note that it isn't strictly necessary to make the objects the same size as onscreen controls, or to represent all onscreen objects (some are just indicators, not interactive controls)
Other considerations;
Given (for now) two sets of X/Y coords as input (left and right hands), what is my best option for using them? My first instinct is/was to create some kind of focus test, where if the x/y coords fall within the interface object's bounds that object becomes active, and then becomes inactive if they fall outside some other smaller bounds for some period of time. The cheap solution I found was to use the left hand as the pointer/selector and the right as a controller, but it seems like I can do more. I have a few gesture solutions (hidden markov chains) I could screw around with. Not that they'd be easy to get to work, exactly, but it's something I could see myself doing given sufficient incentive.
So, to summarize, the problem is
represent the interface (necessary because the default interface always expects mouse input)
select a control
manipulate it using two sets of x/y coords (rotary/continuous controller) or, in the case of switches, preferrably use a gesture to switch it without giving/taking focus.
Any comments, especially from people who have worked/are working in multitouch io/NUI, are greatly appreciated. Links to existing projects and/or some good reading material (books, sites, etc) would be a big help.
Woah lots of stuff here. I worked on lots of NUI stuff during my at Microsoft so let's see what we can do...
But first, I need to get this pet peeve out of the way: You say "Kinect based multitouch". That's just wrong. Kinect inherently has nothing to do with touch (which is why you have the "select a control" challenge). The types of UI consideration needed for touch, body tracking, and mouse are totally different. For example, in touch UI you have to be very careful about resizing things based on screen size/resolution/DPI... regardless of the screen, fingers are always the same physical size and people have the same degreee of physical accuracy so you want your buttons and similar controls to always be roughly the same physical size. Research has found 3/4 of an inch to be the sweet spot for touchscreen buttons. This isn't so much of a concern with Kinect though since you aren't directly touching anything - accuracy is dictated not by finger size but by sensor accuracy and users ability to precisely control finicky & lagging virtual cursors.
If you spend time playing with Kinect games, it quickly becomes clear that there are 4 interaction paradigms.
1) Pose-based commands. User strikes and holds a pose to invoke some application-wide or command (usually brining up a menu)
2) Hover buttons. User moves a virtual cursor over a button and holds still for a certain period of time to select the button
3) Swipe-based navigation and selection. User waves their hands in one direction to scroll and list and another direction to select from the list
4) Voice commands. User just speaks a command.
There are other mouse-like ideas that have been tried by hobbyists (havent seen these in an actual game) but frankly they suck: 1) using one hand for cursor and another hand to "click" where the cursor is or 2) using z-coordinate of the hand to determine whether to "click"
It's not clear to me whether you are asking about how to make some existing mouse widgets work with Kinect. If so, there are some projects on the web that will show you how to control the mouse with Kinect input but that's lame. It may sound super cool but you're really not at all taking advantage of what the device does best.
If I was building a music synthesizer, I would focus on approach #3 - swiping. Something like Dance Central. On the left side of the screen show a list of your MIDI controllers with some small visual indication of their status. Let the user swipe their left hand to scroll through and select a controller from this list. On the right side of the screen show how you are tracking the users right hand within some plane in front of their body. Now you're letting them use both hands at the same time, giving immediate visual feedback of how each hand is being interpretted, and not requiring them to be super precise.
ps... I'd also like to give a shout out to Josh Blake's upcomming NUI book. It's good stuff. If you really want to master this area, go order a copy :) http://www.manning.com/blake/
I have a problem not sure how to solve this. Hmm I am developing a game, a multi touch game, I already can make everything working fine, except a small issue that I want to show messages on the playing screen, each time the player makes actions. like his finger moves right the message says : "this finger moving right" nicely at the bottom of the screen, then if the finger move left, then it says the his finger moves left... something like that, can anyone show me how. I am using Cocos2D , it shall be much easier in Cocoa.
Thanks a alot for any help.
You'll probably need to be more specific with your question, but for now, here's a general answer:
Handling touch events on the iPhone and Handling touch ("trackpad") events on the Mac.
You'll receive and process the events per the above, then you'll display the results somehow. For testing, you'll probably just want to log the results to the console. For the final version, you might have a label or even a custom view that draws the "instruction" in some fancier way. If the latter is the case, you'll want to read up on custom views and drawing for whichever platform you're using (or both).