Direct Native Text Input

pHghost

Is there any hope of getting native text boxes, where if the player taps it, the iOS keyboard pops up and the text can be entered in directly? The current implementation of a GS text window popping up for text input takes the player out of the game experience and is a black eye visually, breaking the UI and visual style of both the game and iOS.

Thanks!

tenrdrmer

I agree fully. Have always been disappointed with the method they chose for text input.

pHghost

Is there an intelligent way to do that, though? I don't want to have a keyboard present all the time, only in those moments (yes, spread apart but not entirely rare) when there is a text box that can be interacted with.

tatiang

But then there's the issue of displaying what the user typed. I've created an entire custom keyboard with a cursor that displays text and allows for spaces and backspaces but it's a pain and it's far from perfect when compared with the built-in keyboard.

pHghost

I think @tatiang means that just to have the textbox add to what was written and not overwrite it constantly, and including actions as backspace are quite complicated.

How would it be with the accuracy of a custom keyboard as well?

tatiang

Right, I just mean that when you create a custom keyboard you also want to show what the user is typing. If they type COOL, they are typing C... O... O... L and the game should show them that progression by display C, then CO, then COO, and finally COOL. It's not a great user experience to type on a keyboard and not see anything happening even though an attribute is storing the information. It may seem like a no brainer that that needs to be included with a custom keyboard but it's not a trivial matter to create a blinking cursor and characters on the screen with proper spacing.