NaturalEdgePan VS TPMouse

AutoIt is also great especially for quickly prototyping GUIs.

I recently built a proof-of-concept for a modernized method of interacting with RTS cameras[0], which unfortunately could not be achieved with frameworks like SDL due to their abstraction obscuring some of the native OS functions needed to create my idea.

Using AutoIt lets me basically just treat it as a minimal-boilerplate sandbox to make DllCalls. This also means that I could directly listen as well as post raw device messages. For example, I implemented an inertia-based cursor script that basically lets you use your homerow vim keys like it's a trackball[1], which I now use everyday whenever I'm not with my ThinkPad.

[0] https://github.com/EsportToys/NaturalEdgePan

I came across this very interesting bit of history while looking for an image to illustrate my RTS camera control concept[0] as an analogy.

It's interesting how a lot of the wartime "computational drudgery" frequently employ women, the perception of which shifted to becoming a more men-dominated employment after the war.

It would be lovely to hear interesting perspectives from people here on what other tidbits you know of about little-known roles and the social climate during the war, or your insights on how things came to be the way they are during and after the war.

[0] https://github.com/EsportToys/NaturalEdgePan#figure-2-this-w...

So I made this prototype, to show how I think new-players can be encouraged to use unlocked camera more effectively -- I think the main friction is less about traditional edge-panning being inefficient, and more about it being accident-prone: players acquiring mouse precision at the same time as learning the game finds themselve accidentally panning the camera when the cursor is close to the edge, so early on they develop a bad habit of leaving a wide space for where you are clicking rather than developing the motor control to kite with the cursor close to the screen-edge and hero.

A playable demo downloadable from GitHub

You can feel it out in the playable demo here!

NaturalEdgePan

And for Windows, my https://github.com/esporttoys/TPMouse was inspired by warpd itself but focuses more on the intuitive usability of direct cursor control via inertia/momentum.

You may be interested in how I did my Windows script for adding three-finger drag[0].

Basically, it is an independent subscriber to RawInput messages that only keeps track of whether or not to send three-finger drag, and posts emulated mouse messages using SendInput. I have a few other scripts that each run as independent userland processes that only monitors their own trigger and nothing else.

Tangentially, not sure if this might serve for some inspiration, but my TPMouse[1] script implemented inertia in a framerate-independent way so that it uses very little resource while having perfect simulation stability.

A previous discussion where I explained the analytic derivation for this low-resource exact-solution damped inertia can be seen in [10]

[0] https://github.com/EsportToys/PrecisionThreeFingerDrag/blob/...

[1] https://github.com/EsportToys/TPMouse

[10] https://old.reddit.com/r/Trackballs/comments/ym9q2t/tpmouse_...

With the TPMouse script I implemented the activation shortcut as LShift+RShift+ which I felt had a nice balance between deliberateness and easy-to-reach (since you are using it with your hands on homerow).

Though because some keyboards have key rollover issues with using both Shifts, Capslock+ is also allowed as an alternative activation shortcut.

[0] https://github.com/EsportToys/TPMouse

I personally use AutoIt a ton as a super fast way to quickly prototype GUIs. It's basically a really simple entrypoint for WinAPI.

Shameless plug: my script for emulating a trackball with your keyboard [0], and my tray app for quickly tweaking your cursor speed (usually for when I'm drawing something)[1]

  [0] https://github.com/EsportToys/TPMouse