Control Ui in Scene?

[DoinStuffMobile]

Hello everyone!

I was wondering if it is possible to put a joystick-like control on a game in scene (think like on a mobile rpg game)?

I have tried different combinations of touch_began and moved but the three things i am looking for are:

1. Character moves in direction the touch is dragged from initial touch, but not to the location of touch

2. For this to only happen on one side of the screen (example : only on the left side)

3. Is possible to have an overlay that includes a joystick on the left and buttons on the right, for example. I can provide pictures if i haven't described this well enough.

Thank you for any guidance or links to where to look. I've only looked at the Scene and Turtle documentation and tinkered around.

If this is not possible I also was wondering if Pythonista's Turtle module would be getting keyboard inputs back since the popularity of bluetooth, smart, and magic keyboards? I think it currently doesnt include them, right? 😅

Thanks again! I haven't ever made a thread before, but I've learned a lot from reading others.
DoinStuff

[mikael]

@DoinStuffMobile, all of your goals are feasible and nothing too exotic.

The trick to handling touches on different sides of the screen in Scene is to use touch_id property of a touch to differentiate between them, and of course the location to see which side of the screen the touch starts in.

Connecting external keyboard keypresses to turtle logic seems easy as well, but I have done nothing with physical keyboards and Pythonista.

[mikael]

@DoinStuffMobile, here’s a very simple example of touches on different sides of the screen controlling different things:

from scene import *
import math

class MyScene (Scene):

    def setup(self):
        l = self.left_ship = SpriteNode('spc:PlayerShip1Orange')
        l.position = (self.size.width / 4, self.size.height / 2)
        l.rotation = -math.pi / 2
        self.add_child(l)
        
        r = self.right_ship = SpriteNode('spc:PlayerShip3Blue')
        r.position = (self.size.width / 4*3, self.size.height / 2)
        r.rotation = math.pi / 2
        self.add_child(r)
        
        self.left_touch = self.right_touch = None
        
    def touch_began(self, t):
        on_left = t.location.x < self.size.width / 2
        if on_left and self.left_touch is None:
            self.left_touch = t.touch_id
        elif not on_left and self.right_touch is None:
            self.right_touch = t.touch_id
            
    def touch_moved(self, t):
        touch = t.touch_id
        if not touch in (self.left_touch, self.right_touch):
            return
            
        delta_y = t.location.y - t.prev_location.y
        
        if touch == self.left_touch:
            ship = self.left_ship
        elif touch == self.right_touch:
            ship = self.right_ship
            
        x, y = ship.position
        ship.position = x, y + delta_y
            
    def touch_ended(self, t):
        touch = t.touch_id
        
        if touch == self.left_touch:
            self.left_touch = None
        elif touch == self.right_touch:
            self.right_touch = None
         
run(MyScene())