App doesn't allow Surface Pro pen input as mouse click?

[Hellsadvocate]

It would be really awesome if the game would allow us to use our surface pro to play. The surface pro's pen doesn't seem to do anything other than hover, as inputs are not detected. However, touches work fine as inputs. Is it possible to implement the pen at some point? This game is made for the surface!

[Coredumping]

I just bought a surface for the purpose of adding multi-touch support among other things. I will try looking into pen support as well, but it might not be added in the near future, though.

[Hellsadvocate]

thanks for the heads up! didnt realize a mouse input was any different than the pen

[Lea]

Pen (assuming it i is same as wacom), work using absolute coordinates. Eg. some specific point on the wacom tablet map to a specific point on the screen no matter of moving pointer "out of edge" or so. You can simply not need to lift the pen due to getting out of mouse mat etc.

Regular mouse on the other hand is operating in relative mode and records the relative movement when you moves it. The mouse itself doesn't know where on the mouse mat it is located. This means a game can eg. get relative movement even if the pointer is at the edge of the screen if it has captured the mouse. Games (or game engines) using these kind of tricks that work for relative input devices can run into trouble when users got a wacom tablet or touch input device which operate in absolute coordinate mode.

I don't know if the Surface Pro can do that, but at least on wacom tablets, you can switch it to mouse mode in which case it will send relative movements to the game/apps and you will get the trouble of running into the edges etc. as with a mouse mat. But I guess with a pen runnig ontop of the actual screen and not on a black tablet, they might have removed the possibility to have it operate in mouse mode as it could be a bit confusing to users expecting it to be in absoulte mode.

If coredumping get to support touch, which would be a absolute mode input sort of, then pen support is probably not that far off. But it depends on how things are wired up in the game and in unity which he is the expert and we can only hope he find a nice way to do it.

[Hellsadvocate]

Thank you so much for the reply and for the information. I've had this happen on different games, so this helps to explain what the issue is. This is a surface pro 4, and I believe it doesn't use the WACOM chipset but instead uses the N-Trig tech.
Unfortunately there is no true relative method. I've tried autohotkey to set F19-F20 to "mouseclick", however, that doesn't work. Hopefully, there will be an option for that in the future, but until then, I'll be waiting to see if Coredumping can support it later.

[Hellsadvocate]

Actually, I managed to figure out a temp fix using autohotkey. I remapped my right click button the side of my pen to act as a left click enable. So without the button clicked, my pen acts like a hover mouse, however, if I hold down the right click when i use the pen it acts like a true mouse. Here's the code:

~Rbutton::
send % "{Click " . ( GetKeyState("Lbutton") ? "Up}" : "Down}" )
return

~Rbutton up:: Mouseclick, left,,, 1, 0, U
return