Keyboard support for the UI (Patreon)

It came to my attention that in order to interact with the UI people that used gamepads had to change the controls scheme in the game settings to "Mouse+Keyboard".

I personally don't use the gamepad to play the game, but it sounds like complete HELL of a thing to do.

No auto-detect, really?!!

So I rushed to investigate how to implement gamepad support for 3dm and was very disappointed. Why?

Because 3dm only supports XInput. It is a method that XBox controllers use to communicate with PC. But the PS controllers use another method called DirectInput, and 3dm does not support it. You can of course emulate XBox controller while still using the PS controller, but the game also gonna think you use the XBox gamepad and will change all the icons accordingly.

And the XBox and PS buttons do not match...

And the cherry on top is that 3dm can't tell the game to ignore inputs. To put it simply - gamepads just don't have enough buttons to interact with the menu and not interact with the game at the same time.

Long story short, there is no way to add a convenient gamepad support.

But !

Luckily, 3dm also does not care about the control scheme the game uses, and even if it's set to "gamepad", it can still detect the keyboard presses. So it was possible to show and hide the menu, but it was impossible to interact with it because...

The game does not draw the mouse cursor in the "gamepad' control scheme

So here I am, adding at least some way to interact with the menu without the cursor...

Keyboard controls

Okay, there are many ways how keyboards can interact with the UI.

And the one I made might not be far from the best ones. In fact, I personally don't like it xD The full list is gonna be at the very end of the post.

You use Up and Down arrows to choose the "next" or the "previous" toggle, and Left or Right arrows to simulate a click. Yeah, I know, sounds horrible.

The best solution for my menu would be using arrows to move through the toggles grid, but it's gonna be such a pain in the ass to implement something like it. Gonna be very time consuming as well, and it would make it a lot harder to tweak the menu for different mods. Cause the mods are not guaranteed to have the same amount of toggles. You can compare the amount of toggles Chiori and Rosaria have.

In other words, I decided to make at least something to allow gamepad users to interact with the menu. Something that is still better than going in the game settings every time you want to play with the mod options a bit. I hope it works for you.

So here are the current controls. The might change in the future. Maybe. I don't know. But it is what it is right now.

Controls list:

• CTRL + Arrows - Moves the whole menu on the screen, 4 directions corresponding to the arrow key pressed

• Up and Down Arrows - Navigates through the toggles. Arrows that change the menu page are considered toggles as well.

• Left and Right Arrows - Simulate mouse click on selected toggle slot. Changes the slider value if the selected item is a slider.

The default button to bring up the menu (and hide it) changed from 'Right Arrow' to ' / ' because it was getting too confusing with all those arrows and their combinations with special keys. You can still change that in the mod's INI file, but keep in mind that the 'Right Arrow' is now occupied by the keyboard-support controls.

All changes:

• Both major and minor compatibility changes for the UI. It should work for more people and support more operating systems and system configurations now.

• Keyboard support.

  • "Select" functionality for toggles and sliders. Different from hover. Hover is when you do it with the mouse, and select is when you do it with the keyboard. Skipping lots of boring technical details no one is interested in - even though they are similar, they are still different and I had to add this functionality :D

  • "Simulate click on selected toggles" functionality. Simulated clicks are not different from real clicks. A mouse button is also a 'key' in computers eyes, so this was simple.

  • "Change slider values with the keyboard" functionality. Okay, this one is different from doing it with a mouse, but was not a big deal after I made the "select" functionality. You "select" the slider and then if you press "Left" - the slider cursor goes left, if you press "Right" - the slider cursor goes right :D

• Slider cursors are now glowing when your cursor is on the corresponding slider or if it is selected with the keyboard controls.

I initially added keyboard support for ANOTHER CHIORI MOD made by my texture artist, but the mod is not published yet, gonna publish it only in a couple of days. So I decided to add these changes to the recent Rosaria mod as well because I fucked up and forgot about the CN version and had to open it and work on it again, and because that mod is gonna have toggles in the free GB version, unlike the free version of not-published-yet Chiori mod (cmon, Arle is gonna knock on our day in 12 days, and the UI for each version of the same mod requires INI tweaking, no time for that xP ).

I am not adding it to my own Chiori mod (Chiori Ecchi Tailor) yet, because I need more feedback from people, especially those that use gamepads to play the game :D Will probably happen only after Arle release.