Re: [AD] pressure support

[Thomas Fjellstrom <tfjellstrom@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On February 21, 2010, Elias Pschernig wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-02-20 at 23:44 -0500, Evert Glebbeek wrote:
> > I can't convince myself. On the face of it it makes sense to map
> > things like trackpads and tablets to joysticks - even a mouse can be
> > mapped onto the joystick API if we wanted to, and treating things that
> > are, in a sense, similar in the same way seems sensible.
> > And yet.
> >
> > One of the things I don't like about it (maybe the main thing) is the
> > extra abstraction. My laptop has a keyboard and a trackpad. When I use
> > it at my desk at home I plug in a mouse and a keyboard and when I play
> > a game I may plug in a gamepad. When I want to read input from any of
> > these devices in an Allegro program, I want to know when a "mouse
> > button" is pressed, or what's happening with "the gamepad". I don't
> > want to ask for the status of "button 3" on "input device 2" if I want
> > to know about the middle mouse button. Similarly I want to ask about
> > "joystick 2" rather than "input device 4".
> > By the same token, if I wanted to know about the pressure on the tip
> > of a pen (a scalar quantity) then I don't want to have to check which
> > axis (something that my mind links with a vector quantity) represents
> > "pressure" and check that one.
> 
> Why? It's enough if the user of your game knows (by displaying a name
> string of the device, which is the device name ("gameplad") and
> axis/button name ("pressure") - but in the end, just a string).
> 
> If I make a game, I'll for example map it to mouse and keyboard. Since I
> develop it in Linux, there's no way I'd code in support for gestures.
> However, I always provide a config screen where the user can select any
> game action and then map it to arbitrary inputs by pressing a
> button/moving an axis.

Not going to support XI2? It supports multi touch, and gestures might not be 
too far behind.


-- 
Thomas Fjellstrom
tfjellstrom@xxxxxxxxxx