Trackpad tap vs Mousepad click?

[Hobbes]

Bit of a niche question! And perhaps only Mac-specific. Not sure, since I don't have a trackpad-enabled Windows PC to test with.

I recently played through Lamplight City on my Mac and one of the reasons it was such an enjoyable experience is that every single tap with my finger registered perfectly as a mouse click. This made it very simple to play, without having to force-press my trackpad down every single time.

Running the latest AGS Mac version on my Macbook Air (compiled with cmake) it appears to be very hit-and-miss. Most of the time I need to do a hard press to get a click to register. Very infrequently, a tap will suffice. I would love to have my game fully "tap responsive" similar to Lamplight.

Is this something that I should enable in the game settings somewhere or has something changed in how clicks are registered? Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

[eri0o]

@Hobbes, you mean the SDL2 version of the Engine? (3.6.0.X) ?

This is an unrelated ticket but it has some interesting information related to MacOS touchpad in SDL2.

I found similar bug reports in different projects that also uses SDL2, maybe it's a similar problem:

• github.com/FNA-XNA/FNA/issues/130
• github.com/vurtun/nuklear/issues/407

Ah, Sonneveld left a note on our codebase in a comment that mentions this problem with tap clicks in MacOS.

My guess is if a mouse down and up happens in the same frame, we need to delay the mouse up internally in AGS to only happen in the next frame. Not sure how to make that happen yet, maybe CW will have an idea.

[Hobbes]

Eri0o, I'm sorry, with latest version I meant the latest officially released version, so 3.5.1 - Patch 3. I'm really keen to try out 3.6.0, but will probably wait for the official release :-)

From what little I understand about Sonneveld's comment, it would seem to be exactly what I'm describing. The question is then - how did Grundislav circumvent this? Lamplight City works like a dream with light taps instead of hard presses. Is that because it's an older version of AGS and something changed, or did Francisco do something specific himself?

[eri0o]

Please try the current master (SDL2) version if possible (backup your game! Azure Repos is great for version control too. Or just create a new test game!), the more people try it and report problems the faster it advances from alpha to beta and then from beta to stable.

But Francisco had a person porting the game and since the old version use allegro4, it was probably hacked there somewhere - allegro4 was not updated anymore for years in upstream but because it was around and not changed for so long, it was relatively easy to hack it. But moving to a complete new and updated backend makes things a bit easier to keep up (OSes and platforms seem to move very fast lately).

Anyway, I will try to reproduce later and open the ticket on AGS repository.

[Hobbes]

You're right, I should just make the jump. And I did! Updated my Wine container on MacOS to AGS 3.6.0 Alpha 9. And it's working great, the tap-to-click function is supersmooth now. So it seems that the issue is resolved by moving to SDL2. Thanks!