New Release: Multitouch 📱

Announcements
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New Release: Multitouch & Gestures

Earlier this evening I deployed a new update to enable Multitouch and Gestures in Flowlab’s behaviors.

New Features

Gesture Block

This new trigger block adds three types of gestures to use as game inputs:

  • Drag - track multiple touch points
  • Rotate - track rotating fingers
  • Pinch - track finger distance for e.g. pinch-to-zoom

Touch Check

This new behavior will check if your game is running on a touch screen enabled device, so you can more easily show or hide specific UI elements on those devices

Fixes

  • Ease blocks now complete normally after game pause/resume
  • Fixed Timer/pause regression
  • Fixed Timer/pause problems in emitted objects
  • occasional “Loading” error when editing level info

Let me know in the thread if you have feedback, problems, etc
Thanks!

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No. Freaking. Way. Making mobile games might be so much easier now.

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This is game changing.

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@grazer I love you
not in a weird way

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Please, PLEASE make a help video

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this is awesome!

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you don’t have a phone?

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I have been primarily on mobile for over a year—this will make things so much easier, thank you!

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a feature got added that we’ve been wanting this whole time. woo hoo!

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yeah it does for clarification

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Taile Gamougg Mouse Slayer players are gonna have fun today

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Can someone hypothetically make an fps shooter now?

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that was actually already possible before

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Note that touch only works on mobile browsers and will not be detected by pc atm, but you can still test it by using a mobile browser test in the browser console.

As for tracking individual drags with object tracking, here are my multi thumbsticks example for this new behavior:
Flowlab Game Creator - Mobile Thumbsticks

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Will it work on my touchscreen laptop? Its a normal Windows 11 computer but it has a touch screen

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This is amazing for mobile great work on the update! Can’t wait to try them out.

I do have a questions, would it be possible to implement a scroll wheel trigger that acts like the pinch-to-zoom?

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I don’t think so. It has to be on a mobile browser because that’s how it detects the behavior.

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Upon my first try using this, everything seems to work mostly fine (the multi-touches for instance); however, I noticed a few potential issues already:
-the game coordinates do not output correctly when the camera is zoomed (same with MouseMove I think)
-pinching still triggers one of the touches as a drag (or both, I can’t tell), so using it for, say, camera zooming may cause issues if drag is tied to something else
-the pinch % resets to start at 100 each time, which is nice except that it then requires extra code to tie it to camera zoom (so that it starts from the current zoom instead of 100)
-the background repeat still doesn’t work correctly with zoom (not specfic to this update but I figured it’s still relevant since pinch to zoom has been added)

Example

I made a quick tap & drag camera example, where some of the above issues are addressed but not all: Flowlab Game Creator - Top-Down Shooter Testing

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Thanks for testing out the release @thebrickccentric!

It behaves the same as MouseMove, yes - they should probably both be adapted to compensate for camera zoom, so that you don’t need to do that manually.

This is an intentional part of the design - using one gesture trigger does not negate or disable other blocks. The current behavior enables you to e.g. drag with one finger, while also pinching or zooming with the other.

This is also by design (rotate is the same way). The behaviors do not try to keep a history of different gestures and append the outputs over time. It does mean that the zoom or rotation must be manually stored when the gesture is complete, as you mentioned.

Yeah this is still a known issue, unfortunately.

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