Angband for Android 10 (volunteers needed)

[Diego Gonzalez]

The game has 3 keyboards, the normal one, the "Sym" and the "Ctrl^".

If you tap in the "Sym" key you get access to the F-keys and other stuff.

Long press over "..." and "Ctrl^" trigger different levels of keyboard visibility.
Long press over p,f,o,u trigger (Ctrl-P, Ctrl-F, Ctrl-O and U, the last one is the "use" command).

I like your idea about the tap "zones" very much. Will do that.

I installed DCSS briefly on my phone some months ago. I'll take a better look now.

Thanks!

[Yamaneko]

I'm super happy with the Android port. Usually I play in portrait mode with the fit width option. But zoom-in and zoom-out mapped to the hardware volume-up and volume-down buttons respectively is really helpful.

On Android I play much slower compared to the desktop version. This is not necessarily a bad thing; playing on Android has a certain flow to it. For me, the interface is well done overall.

I use tap on screen for movement. This works well most of the time, but I also ran into some walls because I tapped slightly off, like I wanted to walk west but somehow my big thumb landed on southwest. Maybe an optional and very transparent 3x3 grid overlay would help me.

In addition, I was wondering whether it might be helpful to extend the keyboard by including F-keys. Let's say five of them.

Some frequent commands on Android require multiple taps and are more cumbersome compared to a full-blown hardware keyboard, such as "list of monsters" or "cast netherbolt." If I had five F-keys, which I would be able to easily remap, I would put list of monsters on F1, list of known objects on F2, netherbolt on F5, or something like this. This is not about remapping key commands. Instead, it's about having additional keys to make some commands more easily accessible and more convenient while keeping the original keyset intact. Ideally, I would be able to assign F-keys to keystrokes such as m-a-a (or whatever I happen to choose).

But as said, I’m very happy with this port, so these suggestions are more for convenience.

Finally, I recommend to have a look at the Android port of DCSS (ASCII version). There too the interface is done quite well IMO.

Again, thanks for your efforts so far.

[Diego Gonzalez]

Thanks! Have to take a look!

[Pete Mack]

Nick did something similar for FA on NDS (IIRC) back in the day. There were only a handful of buttons left--one for "use", one for fire, ones for directional movement/running, and it had mouse movement. It also allowed new buttons bound to keymaps. And it was heavily used by the FA guru Psi.

[Diego Gonzalez]

By the way, are you planning some updates to improve usability for Android gaming ?

As you know, Angband is keyboard-intensive, and it has a lot of commands. The menus can also have many options (letters and numbers).

The angband screen has many elements (stats at the right, flags at the bottom), so dealing with all that (on small devices) isn't an easy job. Plus, we are all accostumed to access the many commands of the game in a very fast way.

I think that the transparent keyboard is a nice addition, but it's a bit annoying in the middle zone of the screen. Still, the game remains playable. I have a ranger near dlvl 100 right now.

I have plans to take that middle portion of the keyboard and put it in the upper-right corner as a possible improvement.

I'm open to brainstorm about new inputs methods

[saeniel]

Oops. Thank you

By the way, are you planning some updates to improve usability for Android gaming ?

[Diego Gonzalez]

Also, you can set the orientation of the screen there.

[Diego Gonzalez]

Thanks! Long-press over the game show options.

Usually I pick "Fit height" and "Toggle Keyboard"

[saeniel]

Thank you so much!
It looks..great!

Just one question. How do I have turn on the keyboard in landscape orientation?

[Diego Gonzalez]

Thanks to you for trying !

[Yamaneko]

I tried this on my Nokia 6.1 with Android 10 (we discussed this through email) and after the port was updated to version 1.6, everything seems to run just fine.

Thank you so much for your efforts!

[Diego Gonzalez]

I've uploaded another version to the play store, this time updated to android 10

I don't have such a device. Can someone try it and tell if it works?

Thank you all!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.rephial.xyangband&hl=es_419