Forums » Code » Virtual Keyboard

sup
I'm making a game and i made a chat and the thing is i'm thinking how to type a message on Android for example.
Did anyone make a virtual keyboard for Impact?
And even if not, i think it's a good idea. Maybe to make a research and check different javascript virtual keyboards and rewrite some on Impact??

What do you think?

I think that any rewrite is a massive rewrite to try to get any of the existing virtual keyboards working, such that you might as well not bother looking at them at all.

Though if you made a chat, why not use a regular textbox outside the canvas and use the regular keyboard? I suspect users might appreciate a consistent keyboard than not...

>regular textbox outside the canvas
the whole point is to let ppl type on mobile devices like Android
if for example u have fullscreen game running. that 'd be really nice to have virtual keyboard inside Impact to type messages, fill textboxes and stuff.
I saw it on PSP and other consoles. And i wrote GUI many times. It's just really good thing to make for devices which don't have a keyboard.

Maybe i'll make it myself later. Or maybe there's a way how to call device virtual keyboard. Does anyone know how to do it?

the whole point is to let ppl type on mobile devices like Android

Yes I did kind of realise that, since I can read and you stated it in your first post. Not knowing what you were actually trying to achieve in detail, I wasn't sure whether that was a viable solution for you or not, so I thought I'd at least suggest it in case you didn't realise it would work.

Putting a virtual keyboard inside Impact out of the box itself is a bad, bad move. Not only would every user who uses it pretty much need to redefine everything themselves (so it fits in with their app rather than using the in-built one) but supporting all the different characters that can be typed is difficult - and I'm not sure even Impact's font code can support all the characters. (The ASCII set, yes, anything beyond that, not so sure)

There's no way to directly call the virtual keyboards you have in mind; Impact uses a canvas to draw on, and if you're looking at building for Android directly, odds are you're going to want to distribute a built app, which means you're looking at using AppMobi rather than Impact on its own - might be worth seeing if they have anything (seeing how they also provide PhoneGap)

hm... yea u right.
i'm not focus only on Android.
I just thinking how you can type (for example in chat) on each platform.
For example for PC and OSX you can use just standard keyboard. but what about Android on iOS, how can u type messages there? maybe there are other ideas.
I mean for example u have fullscreen game on Android and you have to somehow type chat messages. Any thoughts?

-sigh-

You might have some luck using Appcelerator's Titanium product to build using the native keyboard, but even then that's still utilising a textbox under the hood to do the work.

If you want anything that's not using the native keyboard, you will have to draw it yourself, deal with all the input yourself and decide whether you want to get into the realms of trying to support multiple languages or not.

Or you could take a step back and consider that there's a very good reason most mobile games do not have 'enter your name' features, or indeed anything that uses text entry - simply because it doesn't actually work that well on mobile.

Typing on mobile is generally a slow process - even on an iPad where the keyboard is quite a bit larger, it's still not as far as using a regular keyboard, and typing for extended periods of time is not exactly comfortable. If you're hoping for a chat feature, use the device's voice capabilities (which is outside the realm of Impact, too) rather than bodging it with text chat.

Laptop without inbuilt keyboard

I 100% agree with Arantor on this - use native html text inputs. Unless you want to re-invent the wheel, keep up with 500 mobile device changes, etc, etc, etc.....

To the OP: are you trying to achieve something that cannot take advantage of the native keyboard available through html textareas or inputs?

>are you trying to achieve something that cannot take advantage of the native keyboard available through html textareas or inputs?

no. i mean if u know how to call native virtual keyboard on a device, please post here cuz i'm really just interested how to type on android (for example) when i have Impact game running fullscreen.

Well , assuming this is an HTML5 web app, a really simple way to achieve this would be to have a small div shaped like a tab at the bottom of the screen. When clicked, it'd animate up, exposing text/input boxes so the user can type into your chat client. When the user clicks on the input box, virtual android of iOS keyboard should appear letting them use your chat.

sounds like a solution :3

And is really basically what had already been suggested, just made prettier... how about that?