Screen vs. Spot zooming

[TomFrost]

I'm making a new thread for this since it's been mentioned in a few different places in here-- there's a big feature request out for a way to enlarge the screen or part of the screen in order to get more accurate clicks. As anyone who's ever played Monkey Island or Indiana Jones will tell you, hitting the right conversation response alone can be darn near impossible.

Many people have suggested the ability to pinch-zoom and scroll the entire screen. To be honest, I couldn't disagree with this more. The last thing I want to be doing is taking five times the time to play the game by constantly zooming in on the next section of the screen I want to click before clicking it, inadvertently sending false clicks in the process, and naturally missing the action in other parts of the screen that aren't showing when I'm zoomed in. It just seems like an enormous amount of trouble. Better than nothing, but definitely not the best solution.

So in light of that, here's my suggestion outline:

• Implement the exact same under-the-finger magnifier in ScummVM that's used whenever you move the keyboard cursor in a text field while sending an SMS message/E-mail/etc.
• In normal mouse mode (NOT click-and-drag): Sitting your finger on the screen brings up the magnifier exactly how it would in another program. It does not send a click. If you lift your finger OR if you move your cursor to anywhere within a certain radius of where you sat it down and then lift your finger, it sends a single click at the position where your finger lifted off. If you move your finger outside of that radius and "look around", no click is sent when you release.
• In click-and-drag mode: Sitting your finger down displays the magnifier and sends the initial click. Moving your finger within a set radius (possibly larger than the radius used in normal mode) and then lifting releases the click. Moving outside of this radius will let you look around without sending any clicks.

The only immediate problem with the above is that it doesn't allow magnified precision for the initial click in the click+drag games. But perhaps we can refine this idea better here

[PeterCats]

I agree with your thoughts about pinching and zooming. As I feel that we need something full-time in games such as MI where dialogue and small details need regular clicking.

One of the main issues is that the finger input obscures the portion of the screen we're trying to click on. It would be ideal (just as in the magnification method) to display what is under the cursor in magnification somewhere else on the screen.

I feel the current method to pull up the magnification lens is not the optimal method to tell the software that we want magnification. (Although it's vastly better than clicking and dragging.)

I propose the following solution: When rotating the screen into the portrait mode. (where the game screen scales quite small) We could have the blank area below the screen turn into 2x or 3x magnification box of where ever the cursor is on the screen. This in effect allows to see under where your finger is located on the screen, but can also provide a neater place to select/interact, as it's quite fiddly to select dialogue and small items etc on the landscape screen (The concept is similar to the Navigator in Photoshop.) I'll draw up a screen shot if I'm not making much sense.

[fox1401]

Or it could be done this way: most people would use their fingers as the mouse pointer, sitting one finger on the screen and move around, so if the cursor is put just above where the finger we sit on the screen, the text won't be blocked anymore.
But of course there is a little trade-off for this to be implemented. It is that the screen size can't be full since when we want to access the bottom part of the screen, it means we have to point a few pixel lower than that (which means out of the screen).

[PeterCats]

Interesting idea, maybe it can be like the loupe in apple aperture, which rotates around depending on which side of the screen you're trying to access (it's how apple got around that problem of the cursor/visible area problem)

[raptorjr]

I have a suggestion to this. It is kind of like what fox1401 suggest, but without having to make the screen size smaller.
What if the pointer is always a little bit away from the finger so you can see the pointer. But unlike fox1401 suggestion the pointer isn't always above the finger, the pointer is always in front of the finger.
So if you move up, the pointer is above your finger. If you move left the pointer is to the left of your finger. If you move right....well i think you understand my point. So no matter which way you move, the pointer is always in front of the finger.
This way you could always see the pointer and it would be a little easier to select the right things. And don't think it would be much harder to navigate. You'll learn this new way fast.

What do you think?

[Morganoure]

Just a few letters around the cursor, like in text cursor positioning, isn't going to do it most probably (re: similar texts to click on), so it would have to be a larger glass.

And actually, I think the magnifying glasses would take up more time than pinch-and-zoom.

You would need it for most clickable areas where there's something small to click, and moving a magnifying glass all around the screen to identify possible small objects is - just imho - more work and interaction than just zooming in to 200% and quickly swiping across the scene.
Remember you're used to the magnifying glass in text writing for quite rare usage - there's its quite fine, but in ScummVM, we would need it regularly.

Also, don't forget that the magnifying glass usually has a delay, and having to wait 1/2/3 seconds every time you want to use it might mean much more interaction than pinch-and-zoom. In the same time I wait for the magnifying glass to appear, I could as well zoom in, click and zoom out.

Both methods do cost - imho - a very similar amount of time, so I would use the amount of aditional interaction instead of the amount of additional gameplay time as an arguement (and am kind of afraid that that could also be a matter of usage customs - do you like to look around in each scene, even at "useless" things, or do you like to quickly finish the game?). Magnifying glass would be for the power gamer, pinch-and-zoom for the chilling dude