Steam's new
Big Picture front-end for home theater PCs introduces the flower, a text input method designed for gamepads. Eight groups of four letters are arranged in a circle. Pressing and releasing a direction or long-pressing it moves the cursor; holding a direction and pressing a button enters that letter corresponding to the button's position within the direction's group.
Code:
,-------+-------+-------.
| \ | B | F |
| ; & | A C | E G |
| _ | D | H |
+-------+-------+-------+
| Z | | J |
| Y ? | | I K |
| ! | | L |
+-------+-------+-------+
| V | R | N |
| U W | Q S | M O |
| X | T | P |
`-------+-------+-------'
L: Capital R: Numbers
For example, on the Super NES, you'd type "assembly" as Up+Y, Down+A, Down+A, Up+Right+Y, Down+Right+Y, Up+X, Right+B, Left+Y. But I wonder how to adapt it to something like the NES that has fewer convenient buttons.
The best minimal input keyboard I've ever seen was written for the
OnHand PC, in a program called
Teclado.Code:
jklmnopqr
ghi stu
d v
e w
d x
cba .yz
^_>
^ = change case.
_ = space.
> = change page. (To numbers for instance)
It used only a joystick to type, with a max of three keypresses per character. (assuming it's on the current page) It works by narrowing down your character until there is one left. Above is the default. Let's say I press left. Then this is presented:
Code:
ghi
d
e
d
cba
I press up. This is presented:
Code:
h
g i
If I press left, g is typed. up, h is typed. right, i is typed. Down would return to the previous narrowed down set of characters.
If you wanted to use buttons as well, you can could do something like select changes pages, A is space, B is backspace.
I had worked out a system that was very similar to this for the GBA, but the two shoulder buttons do make a huge difference.
Using all 8 cardinal directions plus each of A,B, AB, neither, gets you 32 different combinations. Start could let you switch to a different plane for rare things.
Kasumi wrote:
The best minimal input keyboard I've ever seen was written for the
OnHand PC, in a program called
Teclado.I clearly see the finger in the first figure. Is it intentional?
Nope. I did it that way so that it was easy to visualize how the letters were going to be grouped, but I'll change it so the top line is straight. That's how it is in the original, anyway, until up is pressed.
This is OK, but probably they should also support an on-screen keyboard, as well as supporting a physical keyboard if it is connected.
what about a 'two motion' input on the original flower?
Something like hold B and use dpad to move the cursor to a different large 'petal', then hold A and use dpad to select the letter within the 'petal'. Yes it'd be two button combos for one letter, but I imagine it'd still be pretty quick and work well with muscle memory.
Then select could change case/special chars and you could even use start as a spacebar, backspace or something that's used frequently.
jedahan in #nesdev pointed me to a
video of Steam's flower in action, as well as describing how to make flower work on an NES controller. Instead of A, B, X, and Y, as one might do with a Super NES or bigger controller, one might use B, BB, A, and AA. Then A, B, Select, and Start for space, backspace, page change, and accept.
I don't find any of this intuitive (for console games) when compared to an on-screen keyboard where you select the letters you want. I only see this methodology being "good" for something like games where chat is commonplace, which (IMO) diminishes the usefulness on non-networked consoles.
Does anyone else feel similarly?
Signed -- grumpy old guy who is tired of having to learn new input methods and UIs when they aren't necessarily better
I like having options.
The flower approach actually looks pretty good to me. I could type reasonably quickly on that, I think.
I really rather loathe the oldschool hunt-n-peck text-entry methods. Password and name entry is easily my least favorite part of older games ... so much so that I'll often choose names like "Aaaa".
Certainly part of the point of the hunt-n-peck screens is "no learning needed", but I'm not certain how something like the flower, where everything's on screen, is any worse.
It'd beat the oldskool method for something with a lot of typing like Jeopardy or Zork.
koitsu wrote:
I don't find any of this intuitive (for console games) when compared to an on-screen keyboard where you select the letters you want. I only see this methodology being "good" for something like games where chat is commonplace, which (IMO) diminishes the usefulness on non-networked consoles.
What about modifying Famicom BASIC to not need the keyboard? (and possibly store the programs into back-up RAM in the catridge as well) Although to be fair I have the feeling it'd feel tedious there too, because what you gain in potentially being able to enter more strokes you lose in the massive steep curve that'd be to remember all button combinations (not to mention being easy to mistype something if you're pressing things quickly, especially the characters mapped to diagonals).
That said, ultimately this is basically a form of stenography (more specifially, a
keyboard).
If you don't want to use a full onscreen keyboard, you can use an onscreen multitap cellphone keyboard. I'm going to take a random stab in the dark and say that most people know how to type on those already. You can even be fancy and use T9 predictive input, which is where it's only one keypress per letter, and based on the sequence you're pressing the buttons in, the software guesses what word you're trying to type in, so "hello" would be 43556 instead of 44 33 555 555 666.
In the end, I don't think you can do anything other than have an onscreen representation of your input method, unless you're literally using a keyboard.