Playing on Android Tablet

[Chazar]

Has anyone experiences with playing Warbarons on an Android Tablet? It works, but there are three things that bug me:

• Scrolling the main map view. Clicking the minimap is very imprecise.
  However, this is ought to be easy to fix:
  On whatever device, PC included, there is a lot of wasted space underneath the move-all/end-turn buttons, so placing four arrow buttons there that scroll the map view would help a lot.
  
• Scale: everything is huge.
  Given the ridiculous 2560 x 1600 pixel resolution of my Nexus10, I expected everything to be tiny, but the opposite is the case: The main map view shows less than 10 squares across, and units are huge and ugly. I cannot zoom out anymore, and changing highres to lowres in the URL makes it only much worse.
  Shouldn't this be easy to fix too with a superhighres option?
  
• Fight order.
  Again, the absence of drag & drop makes it impossible to change the fight order. Maybe again adding some arrow buttons to the fight-order dialog could help (or is there any android browser that does drag & drop?)

Otherwise, I believe that the Disable-Move-on-Doubleclick gold member feature is quite essential there, but I use that already on the PC anyway.

[piranha]

I have been working on the first steps bringing warbarons to touch screens. The first thing I tested was a simple piece of code that made it possible to do drag and drop by moving the finger just like you want it to work. What I found out was that it was quite slow to scroll the map. On a iphone 4 it was a bit too slow, on a iphone 5 it was okay. Snotling tested with a tranformer PAD and it was unplayable slow. Did you get any feel of the speed when using the nexus pad? We will see if we can improve the map performance a bit at least as a part of bringing the game to touch devices.

I've designed a new interface to use for touch devices, its specifically designed to work for phones that have quite small screens.

There are two ways of getting the game available to touch devices, either a real app (still using the same Javascropt code) that we can launch in the various app stores and that is what we want to do, it will require quite a lot of work, but give best performance and a chance to expand the user base. The other quick option is to just fix the things you mention to make it possible to surf here and play.Might be worth doing the second option to let current players play on their pads and phones while we work on the real app version.

About the size of things, I'm not sure yet how android deal with this but on the iOS all CSS files needs to be tweaked for retina and I think it should be the same for android. Right now you probably see everything in 4x size.

Perhaps the touch version should be a gold feature so we can finance a android device and test it on .

[Chazar]

Well, I would not want to play real-time or simultaneous games on my Nexus 10, but then again I do not want to play them on the PC either, since I like to take my time.

The speed is sluggish, but acceptable for me. In fact, I find myself using the tablet for Warbarons more and more: I check my turn time limits, and if there is a new turn, I see all the battles that I defended, adjust production and read/send ingame messages to allies and team mates. I like to mull over my turns, and the tablet easily allows me to quickly learn what happened in Warbarons in between doing other things, and so I can start thinking on how I will react in my turn later on.

However, clicking the mini map takes a good second before there is any response. In addition, tapping the mini map is very imprecise, and since one only sees very few squares at once, I need to click again. This makes it just too annoying. The possibility to scroll from the current position would fix the imprecision and hence require less mini map taps, so I believe it would be acceptable for me to do some part of my turn, but probably not all of it (I would only move in games where I have a good grasp what is going on - otherwise the weird resolution makes it too difficult to get an overview over the battlefield, since every unit is so big.)

Nevertheless, adding four scroll buttons might require relatively little work and does not disrupt the existing interface, but they would make it much more feasible to play on a tablet already, so I think it would be a good idea to implement these for now! I doubt that it would bring extra gold members though, since one already needs to be a gold member to disable the double click move, which I believe is a must to play on a sluggish tablet where one does not know whether the device is just thinking or missed the click.