Re: Emscripten mobile and keyboards

[Floh]

> What's your experience with mobile webapps and keyboard support?

It massively *sucks* :D

I explored a "solution" which involves a hidden HTML text field, focusing 
that text field to bring up the keyboard, and unfocusing it to hide the 
keyboard again. It kinda works, but it has all sorts of problems:

- the helper text field cannot be outside the visible area for "security 
reasons" or hidden, so you'll may see a blinking cursor somewhere overlayed 
over your WebGL canvas

- showing the keyboard must be initiated from inside a Javascript input 
handler, so you can't open it programmatically, but only on user input 
(such as the user tapping the screen)

- I remember some weird problems on different browsers or platforms of the 
keyboard either overlaying the page, or scrolling the page up, or even 
shrinking the WebGL canvas while the keyboard appears

- don't expect it to work for more then 6 six months after a browser update 
breaks something, or on any browser, basically each browser needs specific 
workarounds and hacks.

You can check out my attempts here:

https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/cpc.html

Tap the screen to bring up the keyboard. It seems to work on iOS, but it's 
broken on Android last I checked...

For those 8-bit emulators I came to the conclusion that it is better anyway 
to draw the keyboard myself, because mobile keywords are missing essential 
keys (such as the arrow keys, or an Escape key.

Cheers!
-Floh.

On Saturday, 20 June 2020 20:53:12 UTC+2, Beuc wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Mobile browsers are making progress with WebAssembly support and I see 
> more interest in handling on-screen keyboards in web games.
> (typically so your game's port doesn't get the mobile player stuck with a 
> mere "whose your name" prompt).
>
> I explored 2 main ideas to make the virtual keyboard pop up in SDL2 web 
> applications in a generic way, typically on SDL_StartTextInput 
>  (as Android SDL2 games do) 
> but browsers don't make it easy:
> https://github.com/emscripten-ports/SDL2/issues/80
>
> At this point I'm not even sure at what layer it would be best to 
> implement virtual keyboard support (besides re-implementing it in each 
> application).
>
> What's your experience with mobile webapps and keyboard support?
>
> Cheers!
> Beuc
>

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Emscripten mobile and keyboards

[Beuc]

Hi,

Mobile browsers are making progress with WebAssembly support and I see
more interest in handling on-screen keyboards in web games.
(typically so your game's port doesn't get the mobile player stuck with
a mere "whose your name" prompt).

I explored 2 main ideas to make the virtual keyboard pop up in SDL2 web
applications in a generic way, typically on SDL_StartTextInput
 (as Android SDL2 games do)
but browsers don't make it easy:
https://github.com/emscripten-ports/SDL2/issues/80

At this point I'm not even sure at what layer it would be best to
implement virtual keyboard support (besides re-implementing it in each
application).

What's your experience with mobile webapps and keyboard support?

Cheers!
Beuc

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