Integrating Multi-touch Input into Spring

[bilhamil]

Hi All,
I'm working on integrating multi-touch input into the engine. I have a thread at http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25865that hasn't been updated in a while. Anyway, I've been talking to abma about integrating the code, the fork that I was working on is at https://github.com/bilhamil/spring. At the time I created a branch based on the 0.82 branch so that I knew I was working with something stable.

Right now I'm planning on cleaning up what I did at the time (I did a lot of hacky stuff to make working on my personal project easier). Basically what would be enabled would be passing multi-touch cursor events into lua. Currently I'm just using tuio to receive touch events, which is a cross-platform protocol based on osc for getting touch events from multi-touch sensors.

Is there interest in integrating this into the engine? If so, what would be the best approach going forward? What concerns do the devs have? Should I make a feature branch based on the current development branch? I appreciate the help.

[CarRepairer]

I noticed in your youtube video you used the "pinch" motion to "tilt" the camera (changing the pitch of the map). I would recommend that when you integrate with spring that you follow the model used by the android maps app:

Pinch to zoom.
Two-finger-drag to tilt.

[smoth]

wow, you are still working on that stuff? very cool man!

[Das Bruce]

Holy shit this is a real thing? Nice.

[MidKnight]

Your stuff is awesome!
Of course we want multi-touch!

...no idea where we could get ahold of multitouch HIDs, though.

[HeavyLancer]

...no idea where we could get ahold of multitouch HIDs, though.

Make one yourself?

[bilhamil]

One of my colleagues actually develops sensors that you can just put on top of regular displays http://ecologylab.net/research/zerotouch/index.html. They're pretty affordable, although he hasn't really ramped up production yet. Hopefully, that will happen soon.

[Beherith]

Wow, that demo video features spring! Really nice stuff!

[varikonniemi]

A multitouch desktop display is actually my next upgrade, spring with a proper tuned touch-ui would be something special.



me gusta.

[SirArtturi]

Found this from suggestions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyZrrkwM ... re=related

[MidKnight]

Found this from suggestions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyZrrkwM ... re=related

Use forum search.

EDIT: Actually, I can't find the the thread with that video either using forum search. :s

[SirArtturi]

Ah yes, a bit hasty post. Didn't bother to visit every urls in this thread.

So yeah, doubled, better...

[luckywaldo7]

Dead? No way!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbkM8jlhW9Y

[varikonniemi]

Awesome!

I think what we need is a stable multitouch API, so the other devs can make their adjustments as they please. And this should be integrated into the engine as soon as possible.

Can you imagine spring being one of the first RTSs to support multitouch out-of-the-box and it being 100% configurable just via LUA? That sounds sweet to my ears, and by the looks of it, it is not far away.

Keep up the good work! I REALLY appreciate it, touchscreen displays is the way of the future, we only need to figure out the best way to interact with them!

[bilhamil]

Voidness and I have been working on a lua sockets widget that acts as a TUIO listener for touch events. Basically it opens up a udp socket, parses incoming osc messages, interprets the tuio and generates widget events for touches.

I've attached the listener itself along with some of the widgets we have been using for doing touch interaction if anyone wants to try it out. A lot of it is built off of modified versions of widgets in Zero-K, so I'm not sure how readily the widgets may be added to other games.

Hoping to work on doing Windows 8 touch event integration later this summer (there are a lot of problems with win 7 touch), but this should work with a lot of touch sensors that use win 7 touch using a bridging application like: http://dm.tzi.de/touch2tuio/

[Licho]

Very nice, we could integrate this to ZK itself and the sender to Zero-K lobby if its some sort of open source/CC common license

[abma]

awww,.... awesome! :D

what to do with the touchdev branch then? :-/

[bilhamil]

Like I said earlier I think there would be value in having a windows touch solution at some point, which would have to be done in the engine. That would probably use a significant portion of the code already in touchdev.

btw luasockets was a really great addition to spring imo :)

[123vtemp]

Really awesome. With this new form of user input the interface and way the game is played will diffidently look and work completely different totally different. I see this being most useful in large scale attacks. With the amount of input we can have since we are not limited to just one cursor. we can divide and reorganize, and redirect many more units at a time. For Example, now having a fleet of 20 bombers coming across the screen, with only seconds to divide them between targets might be extremely effective.

The most successful part of implementing extremely effective group management will probably be a transition in scale of focus.

Really really cool potential!

Springs game play potential was unmatched as it is but now it could give even more scale and control to a user. WOW.

[abma]

@bilhamil:

any efforts to integrate the lua-thing into zero-k? i've enabled luasocket as default and listening to a socket is also allowed as default.

see https://github.com/spring/spring/commit ... 3d024e118b

is that enough to make it work out of the box?