How to play FTL with touch support on a Surface Pro 2

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flanger216
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Apr 21, 2014 5:57 pm

How to play FTL with touch support on a Surface Pro 2

Postby flanger216 » Mon Apr 21, 2014 6:20 pm

In case anybody's interested, I figured out an easy way to play FTL as a touch screen game, with no need for additional software. You will need a stylus that supports gestures --- I use the one that comes with the Surface Pro 2, and it works perfectly.

First, go to your settings.ini. Enable manual resolution mode, set the screen resolution to 1920x1040, and enable both windowed mode and stretch mode.

Next, make sure 'disable scaling for high DPI' is enabled on the FTL.exe.

Next go to the Windows control panel and access the 'Pen and Touch' settings. Go to the 'Flicks' tab and select 'customize.' Add a custom gesture for the downward flick, and map it to the spacebar. Add a custom gesture for the upward flick, and map it to the escape key.

Now run FTL. It'll be in windowed mode (touch doesn't work in fullscreen at all), but the window will fill up almost the entire screen. This way the stylus pen maps perfectly 1:1 to the display, and unlike your fingers, the pen correctly registers a mouse-click wherever you touch. Long-pressing works perfectly as a right-click. Drawing multiple-select boxes works great, too.

Now for the cool part --- because we setup gestures to map to key presses, you can simply swipe the pen down to pause the game. If you need to access the game menu, just swipe the pen up. It's easy, and you can pause and unpause as quickly as hitting the spacebar.

It works amazingly well. I've loved FTL since it came out, but this is by far the most fun I've ever had playing it. I imagine it'd work fine for any Windows tablet, so long as you have a stylus that lets you map gestures to key presses. And while it'd be great to have official touch support --- playing this way is like 99% of the way there already.
UltraMantis
Posts: 2141
Joined: Thu Sep 20, 2012 3:17 pm

Re: How to play FTL with touch support on a Surface Pro 2

Postby UltraMantis » Tue Apr 22, 2014 10:11 am

That is pretty amazing. Thank you for posting this.
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