Getting started with touch

This topic covers how to configure touchscreen overlay controls for your Xbox Game Streaming title.

You can make your game playable without an attached controller. Touchscreen controls increase the number of users who are playing your game, increase engagement for mobile users, and provides users an intuitive experience for their device.

There are two avenues for bringing touch input to your game:

1. Touch Adaptation Kit Layouts. The streaming client can overlay touch controls over the game. You can provide custom layouts that optimize the controls for your game and change to different layouts for different parts of the game.

2. Native touch. You can support touch directly for areas of your game that would respond to standard touch interactions more naturally than controller interactions. Examples where this is commonly desired include menus, inventory management and map interactions.

Touch input, in either form, is not enabled by default. In order to locally test with touch, the Content Test Application can be configured to enable either native touch or touch adaptation kit bundle sideloading. Stream Configuration Overview includes more information about how to use these settings. After touch is working locally, contact your Microsoft Account Representative to enable touch input for others while streaming.

For more information about the CTA, see Web Content Test Application (CTA)

Touch Adaptation Kit layouts

For a more advanced guide on the best practices for designing touch layouts with the Touch Adaptation Kit, please check out theDesigner's Guide to Building Touch Controls

You can take the following actions by using the Touch Adaptation Kit (TAK).

• Create custom touch-adapted layouts.
• Deploy custom touch-adapted layouts to your device.
• Use the Cloud Aware touch adaptation kit APIs to control the display of your control layouts.

Note

Touch adaptation kit layouts are only visible to users that are actively using touch input. When a controller is actively being used, the touch controls are hidden. As such, it is always safe and preferable to add touch adaptation kit layouts and call the Cloud Aware touch adaptation kit APIs

Your game can have a similar touch-adapted layout as shown in the following screenshot.

Support native touch

Supporting native touch is similar to supporting mouse or other input in your game. Touch events will be represented IGameInputReading with an GameInputKind that has the value of GameInputKindTouch.

For a complete guide to implementing native touch, check out Building a native touch interface for your game with IGameInput

See also

Introduction to Xbox Game Streaming Designer's Guide to Building Touch Controls Building a native touch interface for your game with IGameInput