Dragging events on Mobile in C3

I gotta say, the recent update really gets my hopes up that maybe scrolling/dragging events in the event sheet view, might actually become a reality. Even a clunky solution would be used a huge amount by myself.

... Is this on the cards at all?

Being able to drag events, in any way even if it's clunky (but at least possible), feels like the last hurdle to being able to fully using the event sheet view on mobile!

You can already reorder events on mobile with cut and paste.

Well like, actions specifically - if you had 10 actions in an event, and wanted to move the 5th action to the 4th place, you'd have to cut and paste each action 1 by 1 until its in the correct order.

It's really hard to design these features for mobile - what you're talking about there also involves supporting multiple selections, so we basically have to reinvent a whole new mobile-specific UI for that, since we can't rely on holding keys (as is used for multiple selection) or drag-and-drop alone (which on mobile is used for scrolling). I guess we'd have to have a special dedicated tool to first enter a multiple selection mode with all other actions disabled - but still some way to scroll in case you want to select off-screen things - and then follow up with a drag and drop operation to indicate where the multiple selection should go. It's a real headache to design, complicated to implement, and probably time consuming too. As with any feature requests I'd advise posting to the suggestion platform or voting on an existing suggestion if there is one, since as ever we have to balance this with hundreds of other feature requests.

You're going to need touch gestures.

On the bright side you get to use the word arcane a lot.

Multiselection is a "nice to have" imo, but not crucial.

I mainly was curious if this stuff was incoming due to the recent update making changes to touch/pen.

I feel there's an easier approach than needing to heavily modify the event sheet view, but maybe I am missing something. There's already a dedicated global "Mobile mode" that allows the windows to pop out from the sides of the screen, so I'd have thought this wouldn't affect the general desktop user.

What about a scroll area on the left side of the event sheet view that scrolls JUST like it does when using touch, but then the rest of the event sheet view is treated as a mouse with click/select/drag? For a sacrifice of squishing the width of the event sheet view slightly, it would grant fuller functionality.

E.g. In Construct terms: if touch.x < viewportleft()+64 then "SCROLL" , else "BEHAVE LIKE MOUSE (I.e. Tapping would select, dragging would drag the events/actions)

I like to think this would be relatively straightforward to implement as the "touch scroll" code already exists in c3, as well as how mouse behaves within the event sheet view.

You could scroll with your left thumb and you could hold onto a drag with your right thumb and just drag n drop like you would with a mouse.

If it's complicated then I will stop chasing this as it probably is a niche suggestion that won't get much attention, I just hoped a basic method to drag n drop could be thrown in for mobile users.

Multiselection is a "nice to have" imo, but not crucial.

Well, if single selection is all you need, then cut-paste already supports that.

What about a scroll area on the left side of the event sheet view that scrolls JUST like it does when using touch, but then the rest of the event sheet view is treated as a mouse with click/select/drag?

I don't think this is a sensible UI pattern. I don't recall ever seeing any other app doing something like that. I've only ever seen other examples that were based on switching modes, so you only do one thing at a time, not both with magic invisible areas.

I like to think this would be relatively straightforward to implement as the "touch scroll" code already exists in c3, as well as how mouse behaves within the event sheet view.

UI is extremely complicated and hard work to implement. If it looks and feels easy, it's because a huge amount of work has gone in to getting it to that point.

Fair enough, thanks for the reply, I was mostly curious if it was potentially going to be added.

Cut and paste is painfully slow (In the example I gave with 10 actions and moving the 5th action to the 4th position in the list... this would be so many repititions of "long-press, cut, long-press, paste"... only to move an action up by 1).

I understand C3's mobile support is supposed to be for basic touch-ups... I suppose thats why I wish I could drag n' drop events and actions, to "touch-up" my events. To me, reordering events is more "quick touch-ups" than writing out expressions or using the image editing stuff, which all works fine on mobile.

I understand UI is extremely complicated... I assumed "all the code is already there", so I thought it wouldn't be a matter of writing a huge chunk of UI code, but maybe it's just adding a Boolean here or there to check if your touch is within an area of the Event Sheet View, and then checking the boolean and if true, then use the "Touch Scrolling" code, else use the "Behave as Mouse" code. Perhaps I misunderstand and that a physical "touch" is not compatible with the "Behave as Mouse" code or some other unexpected reason.

This made me check out GDevelop as this is the only comparable product I could think of (A Game Development HTML5 app that works on mobile), and turns out that GDevelop allows you to drag n'drop events, but not actions as far as I could see.