I recently switched from Unity to Unreal after seeing the progress done on the experience and the powerful tools available that just don’t compare with what unity offers. So I wanted to start using it for commercial work at my company (we do realtime architectural visualisations for companies or even cities) and do most of our work on ios and windows 8 on kiosk-like computers with touch.
Here’s the catch, we really need touch support on UE4 because without it, a lot of functionalities can’t be implemented (pinch to zoom, two fingers drag, etc…) which are expected from our clients.
So here’s the question, is it possible as of now to catch 2 or 3 touch inputs at the same time (like on ipads) on windows 8 multitouch screens or not ? (if it’s the case i completly missed it…)
If not do you have some ETA on this functionnality or do we someway or another have to code it ourselves…
Until such support is live we regretfully won’t be able to work on apps for windows with unreal which is a shame because everything else blew our expectations !
Have you tried implementing some tests to see if this could work for your situation. We do have touch support in the engine through Blueprints and touch events.
A way to test if Touch is working with Windows 8 for you would be to package Tappy chicken and see if you can use the touch screen to control the game. If this isn’t working for you let us know and I can look into this further.
Actuall what I meant is that right now, it doesn’t seem possible to use the touch events and nodes in blueprint to get touch on the windows platform (unless i’m doing something very wrong).
What I actually tried is to get Tappy Chicken to “jump” not when you touch with the finger index 0 (so the first touch detected on screen) but do it when the finger index is 1 (so the input event fires when the second finger touches the screen while having the first finger still touching it).
The finger at index 0 is recognized in a touch screen with windows only if " Mouse for Touch" property is true in the project settings.
So actually when you touch the screen with one finger on tappy chicken or on my tests with “Use Mouse for Touch” disabled, no touch will be returned, hence the incompatibility with multitouch or any touch actually I was talking about.
Then if you set “Use Mouse for Touch” enabled, the finger at index 0 works when you touch the screen because it thinks you just pressed a mouse button.
The problem with this is that for our company where we do a lot of work on kiosk mode pc’s for high-end architectural vizualisation, and we need multitouch enabled for doing gestures like pinch-to-zoom, or implementing a pan node by dragging two fingers across the screen etc.
For this kind of implementation we would have needed hardware touch support on windows (like on ios platforms) so we can have all touches recognized and distinct so we capture infos like position of first and second finger, delta movement etc, etc…
Anyway for now it’s kind of keeping us at bay from using ue4 on our day-to-day projects and it’s a shame because all the team got really excited on how easy and powerful it has become.
Thanks for your hard work and I will keep monitoring you guys !
Still if you could have a look at this issue we would be really grateful.
Just to give you an update on this. After speaking with some developers this is not in the engine at the moment. There is an internal discussion going back and forth on what’s needed to implement and if it’s something we can get into 4.6
As I get more information and a final response I’ll update the information for you here. Thank you for your patience.
Thanks a lot to you and the guys looking into it !
I really think that with the advent of touch screen windows pc and the opportunities business-wise it opens it’s a shame that UE4 doesn’t understand touch input like on ios (but I know that the implementation is quite complicated too so yeah).
Anyway thanks to you guys and i’ll keep monitoring this very closely so we can transition as fast as we can on this marvelous piece of tech you put together !
I’ve heard back that they will try to push for this to be implemented in 4.6, even if it’s an experimental feature. This should at least be a good start to getting something that your team can work with to developer Windows 8 touch supported products!
Things can change and something may cause this to be pushed back, but it is on our radar now. Keep an eye out for our release notes with each build and what new features are included. I’ll keep this post bookmarked and update when I see any updates.
This does not look like it made it into 4.6, even in an experimental state. I’ve reached out to one of the devs for some clarification and if he may have a timeline as well.
I’m very interested in this as well. I’m working on building a touch-screen app that requires multi-touch input, and currently I can only use touch as a mouse ( 1 input).
Looking forward to see this implemented soon
I’ve reached out to the developer again to check on the status of this. Unfortunately, other priorities will sometimes take precedent which may have been the case with this getting pushed back. I’ll update here when I know something more.
We’re looking forward to get multitouch support for Windows 8 and further versions of Windows. Me and my other developer friends have checked if we can implement few things that are involved in Windows SDK to provide multitouch support in Unreal Engine Source. It doesn’t seem to be hard to implement, but of course that’ll take some time.
These are great news ! We’re following the topic for good news closely.
This seems to be an important feature for many out there! A lot of the hitch that came about delaying it just a little was in regards to Vista and some things going on there from what I was told. I’ll be really happy to see this implemented in 4.8 pending there are no other hiccups along the way.
Thanks very much for keeping an eye on this; it’s something we’ve been struggling with for a while, due to the nature of our organisation, my projects can only be distributed on windows tablets and it’ll be great to know that this is something that will be implemented sooner rather than later. My question is this; much of the comments here are concerned with Windows 8 (which is the most recent platform to be fair) but will there also be support for touch devices running windows 7?
@Hulkysaurus: That’s the hangup right now from what I gathered from the engineers email to me. There is something things being worked out to get it working correctly for Vista, if possible, but right now from the tests it support Win7 and Win8. This will be available closer to the release of 4.8 with the source build and with 4.8 if all goes well. Again, no promises as things are being worked on and there can always be hiccups, but this is the goal at the moment.
I’ve also re-titled this thread to reflect that this isn’t only Win8 specific.
ve some question to ask, i tried to search how i can use blue print for windows touch screen so i can interact with a sample project with my finger same in ipad and android with virtual joystick, but i can’t find anything for that, i found someone said open tappy chicken i opened the blue print it work for windows but the code is very huge and i don’t know from where i will start basically what i want o do is simple
1- i am trying to have a pinch and sweep and click but it recognise in windows touch same as this template from from HegiDev, this template work in mobiles but not for windows how i can switch the code of the blueprint to be worked for windows
i put an attachment to the blue print code is you can help me guys in that, is there any event or input to change to switch from mobile to windows
Hello,I am also very interested in multi-touch for touch screens on Windows 8. If Vista compatibility is the hold up, it would still be very useful to release a Windows 8 only version in advance of a more comprehensive, multi-OS one. Let me know if there’s any way to install a version even with only Windows 8 support. Thanks.
