Interface controls - Mouse-wheel adjustablility for slide-bars

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I hope that this isn’t a repeat. Trusting the similar topic suggestions here :slight_smile:

Hi.
I came across a little bit of an issue I wanted to mention here to decide whether to add it to the suggestions.

Problem:
Adjusting some sliders in the editor has shown to be a bit obnoxious at times. Especially when you want to use up the last couple evo-points. In particular the pressure slider. Because it’s range is so great and accuracy and direction of mouse-movement are ignored when over the point-limit it is a pain for “fine-tuning”.
This probably affects all current and future stages of the game.

Solution:
When your mouse-cursor is on the button like in this image

mouse-wheel-here
mouse-wheel-here1546×837 210 KB

make adjustments with the mouse-wheel possible. Scroll the wheel → adjust higher/lower

You think this is appropriate request for the suggestions?

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I can’t speak for everyone who plays Thrive, but wouldn’t this be possibly be a problem for those who don’t use a separate computer mouse? Maybe using arrow keys, or allowing a key bind for this, would be a better idea.

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I don’t think it would be a problem as my suggestion is meant as an addition, not a replacement.
But yes, additional controls for fine-adjustments can have many forms. I don’t know whether this works on a tablet or a phone so yeah, no mouse-wheel there :sweat_smile:

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I just hope this isn’t too much work for the Thrive devs.

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This is a possible feature to keep enabled in Godot Engine. However the reason why the sliders in the game have that feature explicitly disabled is that most sliders can appear in a context where the GUI content needs scrolling. When the GUI content needs scrolling it is the most natural thing that the scroll wheel scrolls the content up and down. And now comes the unintuitive part: if the cursor happens to line up with a slider while scrolling the GUI, the scroll bar will eat up those scroll events and change its value. Before we started to disable the scrolling feature on the slider bars, I myself experienced many times that the GUI would suddenly not scroll and then after a second I would notice that I was accidentally changing a slider bar with no way to know what the original value was… so that means that the slider bars reacting to scroll input is an absolute no-go in any context where there might be a GUI scroll bar present, which is in most places, especially as we need to be prepared for the different game translations having wildly longer text than in English.

Arrow keys should already work. Just click on a slider to focus it, and then use left / right arrows to adjust its value.

My actual idea how to solve this is to make the pressure sliders logarithmic. I don’t know if that would fully solve it as no one has volunteered to program that change, which means I probably need to eventually do it myself once people bother me too much about it…

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Thrive isn’t planned to be ported for either.

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I’d like to rebut this by saying that scrollable pages also have a bar on the right of the window and it should be less unintuitive once you run into it once.
From the Depths (<- other game) has the nasty issue of the interface being so tight that aiming for the up-down-scrollbar is actually quite tedious. So in that situation I absolutely get your point.
I also understand that this may be a problem for people with mouse-aim issues :thinking:. Maybe it should really just be left as-is…

They do. Thank you :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:
I’m glad I posted it here rather than in the suggestions.
I’ll check the tutorial again to see whether this is mentioned or not. I think assuming that the arrow keys work for that is more unintuitive than the mouse-wheel though :joy:.

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It’s super unintuitive when this happens. Even to me who has worked on Thrive for years, as you are not expecting it so in your head you are focused on scrolling the GUI to what you want to see but then suddenly the scroll stops and you are wondering if the GUI hit the bottom already without showing what you wanted to see. Only after a brief moment of confusion you realize that your cursor has unfortunately hit a scrollable slider and that was the problem. Then you need to correct the slider to the value it should be, move your cursor off it, and then resume scrolling. Extremely interrupting to what the player wanted to accomplish in the GUI.

Our scroll bars are very narrow so I don’t think they should be relied upon, especially as it seems that they will never be made wider (as this issue has been open for 4 years):

So scrolling with the mouse wheel has to be a good experience.

It is not mentioned as this is part of the keyboard GUI navigation. You can actually almost navigate the GUI without the mouse. Similarly most people, I think, don’t know that you can fill out web site forms with keyboard navigation. But in fact surprisingly much software has some kind of keyboard navigation support.

In Thrive for example, the options menu is almost entirely setup for keyboard navigation (just the top tabs cannot be changed) but everything else can be navigated including changing the slider values. The reason why this works is that the same approach needs to be hooked up correctly for controller navigation to work so the little bit of work that’s gone into making Thrive work with a controller means that quite many parts of the game work with only a keyboard.

And just to add one more point, you can navigate GUI focus with Tab / shift+Tab or with the arrow keys, and activate buttons by pressing space. These are also very common keyboard navigation actions.

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Speaking of controller support, do we know how much of the playerbase even uses it?

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No one because it is not usable. You have to have a pointing device to play Thrive currently (for example a DualSense controller is usable).

So this is a catch-22 situation where no one can play with a controller until controller support is fully done, and if controller support would only be done if there’s enough controller players then it’s never getting done.

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I suppose what there is of the controller support is going to stay and not be removed, correct?

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You could put the cursor in the middle of the screen on start-up and then use an analog stick to move it. Sort of like the little red nipple on an old ThinkPad worked, no?

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Are you sure that’s better over just staying with a cursorless experience on controller?

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That’s the laziest possible way how PC games are made to work with a controller. Also this approach requires all on-screen buttons to be pretty big, which we probably don’t do so this would need GUI tweaks anyway to be really usable. And from what I’ve seen players do also realize that this is a really cumbersome way to make controller support.

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I don’t know whether we’re seeing the same thing.
This is what the game looks like for me on 1440p. I think the buttons are quite generously proportioned. For the scroll bars I’d completely agree.

Screenshot_2025-04-07_10-02-04
Screenshot_2025-04-07_10-02-041920×1075 167 KB

btw. I didn’t mention it as the final solution but if it’s like you say and there is no controller support available atm then it’s a start and can be revised as soon as a better solution is found.
It’s not great but I played SimCity2000 and RedAlert on the PS like that (D-pad only, mind you :slight_smile: ) and if it takes a hot second longer to maneuver to where you want then it’s still better than nothing. At least nowadays every controller I’m aware of comes with analog sticks :joy:

edit: I cant realy recall the other editors at the moment but if I remember correctly they’re all sort of similar to this right?

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I suppose they as of the present would generally be of similar difficulty in operating as the microbe editor. Though placing metaballs might be harder on controller…

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That screen does indeed have good button spacing, though that is not true everywhere.

For example the bottom left HUD buttons (which are also present in the editor), which are definitely going to be smaller than any controller moved cursor (for example I looked at how big the Destiny 2 equivalent cursor was and it was smaller than I remembered, but even then I think our smallest buttons are smaller than it).

Macroscopic editor and the microbe stage have a need for dual analog sticks, one for moving around and one for controlling the look direction. So how would those move a cursor on screen?

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I suppose by holding some button whilst moving an analog stick for “the mode” of the stick to change to cursor control. A probably better option is to leave the controller experience cursorless (assuming we ever get to completing this feature).

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I’m thumbs-upping the second part as I think we are going to end up going really overboard with all of the possible game inputs as we get further along in the development. So I don’t see any way that a controller moving a cursor is going to result in anyway reasonable experience. People who want to try that anyway should use a SteamDeck or a controller with a touch pad.

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I wonder how popular might controller use get within the player community if we do end up implementing the feature fully…

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