Subset Games Forum

Hi.
I recently purchased a Windows 10 tablet and tried out FTL on it, and i'm getting a rather strange touch screen issue.
whenever I tap a button or control of any kind in FTL, it doesn't register the touch straight away. instead it behaves like a 'mouse-over' effect, where it just highlights the thing I tapped on. i have to tap again somewhere else for it to then recognise the click. it also then does the same 'mouse-over' effect on the thing i touch when it triggers the click on the first thing.

Anybody experienced anything similar and/or know a fix for it? It doesn't seem to happen on other steam games I own.
I'm on FTL version 1.6.7 by the way.

Hi xwingmario,
I can confirm the two touchscreen issues you are describing. The first one was always present once touch support was added to FTL 1.6+ (double tap to activate anything - touch didn't work at all during the beta test. Previous versions of FTL never supported touch without a mod - a mod which will not work with the latest version of FTL):

xwingmario wrote:whenever I tap a button or control of any kind in FTL, it doesn't register the touch straight away. instead it behaves like a 'mouse-over' effect, where it just highlights the thing I tapped on. i have to tap again somewhere else for it to then recognise the click.

I just thought it was as intended and just a poor design choice. I agree with what I think your sentiment is; in that single tap to activate is the user expectation.
Interestingly, the menus are double tap also.

Touch support was only added into the first release of the latest update to FTL (after the beta.) Somewhere during the subsequent patches which were pushed out to mitigate various issues along the way, this bug started showing up:

xwingmario wrote:it also then does the same 'mouse-over' effect on the thing i touch when it triggers the click on the first thing.

My example is: tap on a door twice to open it and then tap again on the same door to close it and the door next to it opens and the door you just tapped on closes

Honestly, I have held off reporting these bugs because into the breach is out at the end of this month and it is unlikely Subset have the resources to place any more time on patching FTL, because of the new release.
Never the less, I am just chiming in here to confirm this in the hope that someone takes note. As a user of a Surface like device; if I didn't play FTL on a desktop, I would have likely immediately refunded the game having seen this issue.
Hopefully, someone from Subset will pick this thread up and have a look.

I want to add to this that I have now been able to test FTL 1.6.7 with a Wacom touch screen tablet and stylus and it works fine with the stylus, there just needs to be a pause button option like the ipad version.
I think setting the stylus side button to space bar is the quick fix for there being no pause button on the screen.

Touch however, still has the same issues as mentioned already in this thread.
I did also come across an issue where you click on the Controls menu option (shows you how to play) and could not return to the game because on a touchscreen tablet there is no escape key.
It would be really nice to see working touch support in this game. It's an ideal time filler for long journeys.

Judging that I came here looking to fix these issues 6 months later, I think it's easy to say they won't be fixing the torchscreen issues at all.

As for adding a pause button, I found a program called Touchkey, that adds keybinds to the screen. I've used this to add a big button to the right of the screen and it seems to work with FTL (after spending weeks finding this program I then discovered the terrible torchscreen interface for FTL).