[Scummvm-devel] Virtual keyboard work: Request for ideas.

John Willis John.Willis at Distant-earth.com
Mon Jun 8 15:45:54 CEST 2009


All,

> > Does anyone else have other ideas on how we can improve the virtual
> > keyboard infrastructure?
> Current keyboard lacks couple of obvious things:
> 
>   - <delete input> button. I.e. there is backspace, but that's a
>     virtual key. What I mean here is ability to remove keys from the
>     input. Something like "Double backspace" key would work.

Good plan, I'll try and have a look at that.

>   - Ability to close the keyboard with mouse. Currently it is assumed
>     that the user has to press the VK key in order to close the
>     keyboard.

Now that's an interesting one, I'll have a think.

>   - Ability to send the keys from the keyboard, i.e. something like
>     "OK" button

I assume you mean something like a button that pushes all events in the
queue, starts the engine, waits for the events to drop, then pauses again
and shows the keyboard? That might be fun to do ;-).

>   - Ability to close the keyboard without sending i.e. "Cancel" button.

Good plan. I was also thinking of taking that a little further by adding a
few 'features' to the keyboard like a 'take screenshot' button, 'global main
menu' button etc. if the keyboard pack supported such things. Just ideas
that have been popping into my head.

>   - Probably add transparency? But that will be not trivial.

Someone else will have to look at that, way out of my league ;-).

The other thing I have found (and would appreciate some thoughts on as I try
and debug) is that some games (not the whole engines per-say) such as Monkey
2 (in the copy protection screen), Lure (save dialogue), Sky (save
dialogue), RTZ (save dialogue) seem to only support taking the 1st event off
the queue and chucking the rest when the keyboard is closed rather than
taking and processing all events in the queue.

A good way to show this is in MI2 with the copy protection screen, you have
to show virtual keyboard, select 0, close, show, 0, close etc. etc. rather
than being able to just select 0, 0, 0, 0 and close.

Regards,

John






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