2.4 Dev Diary | Controller Improvements

The Dev Diaries return, this time for Trailmakers 2.4, the 100% free update.

We're starting off with some controller improvements. If you want a sneak-peek of what the rest of the update entails, you can scroll to the bottom to find our announcement schedule.

Now, let's get into it

It’s become increasingly difficult to support controller users with Trailmakers’ old UI systems. We’ve seen it time and time again. The UI can feel slow, awkward, and inconsistent to navigate.

On top of that, it also makes things slower and harder for us to update and improve, which is especially important since we want to keep making the controller experience better over time.

The UI navigation rework is meant to tackle these problems by cleaning up and consolidating our UI systems. We’re moving to a virtual cursor controlled by the controller instead of having two completely separate systems like before, one for mouse and one for controller.

Melvin already tried the new changes and gave it 10/10 mushrooms. 

Having one shared core for both mouse and controller means UI features only need to be developed once instead of twice. Controllers can now do the same things a mouse can, and vice versa.

The goal isn’t for controller users to only navigate with a cursor. That by itself wouldn’t really improve anything. Instead, we want to use classic directional navigation where it actually feels better. Being able to mix and match both systems lets us make the controller experience a lot more flexible, and could even let players choose how they prefer to navigate in the future.

How does it work?

Left stick controls the cursor, with settings to tweak how it feels.

Right stick scrolls things like the block inventory.

Pressing the D-pad in a direction snaps the cursor into directional navigation if the UI supports it, giving a more traditional way to move around menus. This works especially well for smaller UI elements. Want to go back to using the cursor? Simply move the cursor with the stick again.

Moving the cursor freely around in block selection. If you still want snapping, you can just use the d-pad. Right stick allows you to scroll while still using the cursor with the left stick.

Cleaning up the UI also comes with some extra benefits:

Better consistency in how the UI looks and behaves.

Better performance in large menus like the builder, making things feel snappier and easier to use.

Fixes for a bunch of old UI-specific bugs we’ve had lying around.

Also, prettier and expanded controller settings!

The controller settings have gotten a makeover and look a bit more in style with the rest of the UI now.

On top of that we've added a Sensitivity setting for the Virtual Cursor and a Cursor Slowdown Multiplier which determines how much your cursor slow downs when passing over an active UI element.

Cushioning the landing for future changes

For this update we invited controller users to test the new features and give feedback during development, to ensure that we didn't miss the mark completely.

The good thing is that after this rework, it’ll be much faster and easier for us to keep improving things based on your feedback as well.

That's it for now. We'll be back next week to show you some dazzling new character customizations!

Announcement Schedule