Are there any plans to add analog L R trigger buttons to the touch controls?

[Equinox55555]

The Dolphin app on Android has been constantly receiving support and that's appreciated, but it's kind of shocking to think right now you still can't emulate every input on the Gamecube controller with touch controls. Just curious if it's on the timeline or is it completely abandoned?

Even something as simple as adding two vertical bars to act as sliding analog buttons above the digital L/R buttons would be nice until a better solution is found. I know it would be cluttered, but people can hide buttons they don't use. Or if this was incorporated to the main version (although I would much rather prefer having more options than just one set level) https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/8590

Thanks.

[MayImilae]

We've had problems with the UX of touchscreen analog triggers. That PR for example was not very good. Not only does it have the issue of doubling the triggers, making the touchscreen interface even more cluttered and intimidating and requiring some additional finger ninjitsu to use, but some games expect the analog to be pressed before the digital click and just do nothing if they don't receive both inputs as they expect. Not great.

The best UX we've come up with is to just bind them together so that pressing L or R presses both digital and analog at the same time. Which is what I believe we are currently doing with the touchscreen controls (our current touchscreen code is really hard to parse >_<). The handful of games that have unique analog and digital input lose that functionality, but it's the best way to handle 99% of the library.

Spoiler:

My best idea for this is a slider style analog trigger, so like, the L and R buttons are replaced with sliders, and you slide a bit for analog but if you go all the way it "clicks" for the digital press, much like how we have analog triggers mapped on controllers. To visualize it, the L and R triggers appear as buttons like they do now, but live in a little track showing the slider range, and have a visual line almost at the bottom to denote the threshold point. But that idea gets messy really fast. Requiring sliding so a single tap on the L and R buttons does nothing feels wrong, as on/off sliders on phones let a tap engage it and bypass the sliding. To fix that we'd need to make a fast press just trigger both while a longer press activates sliding, but that feels very unintuitive and slows the input way down. 3D Touch / Force Touch could have improved this but that's been dead for years now so, meh. Even with all this hackery, for the vast majority of games this idea is still worse than just tapping the buttons and them doing both analog and digital instantly. Ugh.

After further pondering, the idea above shed all its long press / fast press nonsense and devolved into an off-by-default game properties toggle that lets users switch on slider triggers when they explicitly want it for a particular game. So by default tapping L or R presses both analog and digital instantly, or users could turn this theoretical option on and (for that specific game) tapping the buttons does nothing and they are entirely sliders now. It does the job - it provides a way to do analog trigger input with the digital click on a touchscreen without making the controls worse in almost every game, but it feels so bad to make this. Like, it's a lot of work to make this slider thing for something that would basically never be used and almost always make the controls worse. Who would enjoy making a random option that is objectively worse but only exists to cover an edge case? Certainly not me! And sadly, with all the time I've spent pondering this... that's the best idea I've had. We may genuinely have to make that at some point. But I don't really think anyone is going to be very happy about it.

[Equinox55555]

It sounds like a lot of thought was put into this, but I'm not sure I understand everything. When you mention the slider are you referring to a design similar to this? (my first time using imgur I hope this works)

https://imgur.com/a/QYUZwA8

The way I imagined it is that the grey rectangle shows the range of analog inputs for each trigger and the red dashed rectangle shows where a tap registers as an analog trigger input. So you tap anywhere in the red box and it will register as say a 30% trigger press, 70% trigger press etc. Then you slide your finger up and down and the analog level changes with your motion. If you move all the way down to the trigger button then the input changes to the digital + minimum analog press as you would expect on a controller.

But that idea gets messy really fast. Requiring sliding so a single tap on the L and R buttons does nothing feels wrong

I guess the reason I'm a bit confused is because I don't see why you would require sliding as the only way to register an input when a tap should work (at least with my design)

Like, it's a lot of work to make this slider thing for something that would basically never be used and almost always make the controls worse.

I'm not an app developer so I will have to take your word for it, but I imagine a slider would essentially be like programming a bunch of thin buttons stacked on top of each other. Then it would be a matter of making it so only one button is active at a time. I don't see how many design would make the controls worse since the L/R buttons would work as usual. Also the screen doesn't look very cluttered in my opinion, but making it off by default would solve that anyway.