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[GUI Mod] WIP: BG:EE Thumb Buttons for iPad

mars0124mars0124 Member Posts: 180
edited February 2013 in General Modding
Unless you play Baldur's Gate on your iPad sitting in your lap you likely play using your thumbs a lot. This presents a problem as the most useful button in the game, pause, as well as some useful party management tools are tucked all the at the bottom. I consider this awkward and sought to make my game a little more 'thumb friendly'.

For starters, being a mod, this requires a jailbroken iPad. I've another post here that might get you started. Also, this is a work in progress.

Regardless, here are screenshots to see what's what. As you can see I've moved important side-buttons up to a government regulation thumb level.

Screenshots:
Thumb Buttons with no theme
Thumb Buttons with Recoloured v1.1
Thumb Buttons with Archaic GUI 5.5 Beta

Download is here.

Feedback is welcome, I'll see what I can do.
Post edited by mars0124 on

Comments

  • NifftNifft Member Posts: 1,065
    Interesting.

    My iPad 3 is not getting jail-broken, but I like the direction you're taking in making the UI conform to iPad constraints.

    My main objections to how the iPad UI works right now are:

    - Stuff clustered around the border. This was great design for a mouse UI, since it's easy to hit a button right on the border, since your mouse stops scrolling when it hits the edge of the screen, but it's terrible design for a touch-screen. So generally move edge stuff.

    - Buttons are too close to each other. This is fine with a mouse, since you see the EXACT pixel you're going to hit before you click, but it sucks for a touch-screen. Particularly stuff like "Save" / "Delete" being right next to each other.

    - No way to "keyboard-scroll" (i.e. scroll viewport without the risk of directing the selected PC somewhere random). If you could put some thumb-arrows on the bottom of the screen, perhaps moving some of the other buttons, that would be awesome.
  • mars0124mars0124 Member Posts: 180
    Left-hand pane updated in all windows.
    Also uses WeiDU to install now for easy uninstall.
  • wolpakwolpak Member Posts: 390
    Any chance for an update for 1.2 because this is very nice. I have been fooling around with the chu files just to clean up the text box areas. The problem is that it is just a ton of trial and error.
  • wolpakwolpak Member Posts: 390
    I have updated (well, really just recreated) the original premise. I have moved the icons for pause, save, highlight and select all to much more reasonable positions. I have only tested this on the iPad mini (will test tonight on an ipad 2 to see if the buttons are correct due to resolution differences).

    Any suggestions on icon placement would be helpful. I'll make a new post in the ipad forum as well.
  • mars0124mars0124 Member Posts: 180
    If your iPad mini does not have the retina display you won't need to test. It has the exact same resolution as the iPad 2. I, for one, will be downloading it and trying this tonight :)

    Do you have BGII to test compatibility as well? I believe it should work in either one...
  • wolpakwolpak Member Posts: 390
    I do have the retina display, but I also have an iPad 2. Too many iPads (I blame the kids).

    I don't have BG2 yet (just been putting off getting it until I finally got through 1, but I guess I'll buy it and test.

    I tried to make a "pro" version with no help button and better spacing, but when you delete a button, it crashes. I'll look into it more, but it may not be worth the effort.
  • wolpakwolpak Member Posts: 390
    I have updated this thread:

    http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/29837/gui-icon-mod?new=1

    With a new version. The standard just moves the icons where you can see in the above pic, giving a little extra buffer space to save. The pro version removes the help button and spaces out the rest evenly across the bar.

    This mod works on BG:EE and BG2:EE and on the iPad Mini retina and iPad 2 which would make me assume it will work on all iPads.

    Let me know of any errors or suggestions.
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