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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

I confess this tweet surprised me. I can't think of many games (any?) that only act on release. There are plenty that have release activation. Famously there is the video of Mario 64 using half an A press. I don't know of many that only do something on release, though. What games do this?

I am not at all surprised to know that Android had some questionable default behaviors.

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He’s talking about GUIs, not games.

It’s standard for the “click” event to get sent on mouse button release. I think it’s been this way ever since the 1980s.

Fair, I think. Most toolkits usually have a down and release event, with click being a shortcut on those. Has an odd parallel/collision with keypresses, as those also have repeat events, often? I don't know any system that has click repeats as a configured thing.

"Devil Daggers" has an action on release scheme, you play as a floating hand that shoots daggers with two firing modes, a "shotgun" like dagger blast, and a "stream" of individual daggers. The first, which you activate by clicking then quickly releasing, does a lot of damage, but suffers from a cool-down. the latter, which you get by holding for a certain amount of time, is good if you need constant damage.

Interestingly, the game programmed this behavior by moving the position of the hand. When you press LMB, your hand begins traveling forward. If it reaches a certain position, it will start the dagger stream. If you let go before it gets to that spot, it activates the "shotgun" and teleports the hand backward to naturally introduce a cool-down, returning to the neutral position after some time.

People figured out that, because holding the mouse down moves the hand forward, if you shotgun then re-hold the mouse button, your shotgun cool-down is much lower. Most runs will do this because it allows you to do the most damage in the quickest time, but initially learning it is really strange because you don't expect the action to be on release.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNrCdNFAYW4

In MOBAs like Heroes of the Storm you can configure your hotkeys in 3 modes: on-press, on-release, and normal.

I use on-release with abilities that require careful targeting, which causes the press action to activate targeting with the ability firing on release. You can dismiss the ability by right-clicking too. This is usually more reliable than normal targeting since the game requires very quick interactions.

Any idea how popular each is? Just curious.

It's the same in League, they're just called quick cast & quick cast w/ indicator. And normal cast, but I think nobody uses it. I feel like on-release (w/ indicator) is more popular when people can choose, but maybe not.

I like that it's configurable. Perhaps most importantly, some abilities are hardcoded to use the sensible option when only one makes sense.

Nitpicking, the "half an A press" terminology refers to getting effects from having A held, not from the release (I could nitpick this example more but I'll stop there); something like Street Fighter might be a better example for an effect specifically from releasing.

Fair nitpick, I think. Many games have "charge" moves that do something on release. Mega Man in later versions come to mind. Any game that lets you hold on to walls and such. Mario would be what comes to mind for those, as you would hold on to walls until you let go of the button.

Again, fair nitpick.

I wrote in a different stand alone comment but I think this has to do with button down being just unreliable for mechanical buttons. The system always has to do some debouncing, so most GUI systems only listens to button up, and only in games the down event is used with extra caution.

Debouncing was literally several classes in my college years, as I recall. Can definitely be more complicated, but I find the anecdote of a team trying to insist that it isn't a better experience mind blowing.

Granted, just the other day, I found that in GMail key repeat events are slow as heck for some reason. Made holding backspace to delete a sentence annoying.

He specifically does not call out games:

> Game developers, with simple UI toolkits, tend to get this right more often

Totally fair. I should have reworded. How many frameworks only send clicks over and don't have both down/up events included? Key presses usually have a repeat event?

We don't usually go so far as MIDI does with speed of press and such, but that is a fairly old concept.

This isn't about which events are exposed by a UI toolkit, it's about which events are responded to in application code.

> Famously there is the video of Mario 64 using half an A press.

The release doesn't really do much, though? (Does it do anything, outside of stopping swimming?)

Yeah, I meant it more as evidence that things aren't limited to on press. That said, I think the other comments were clear that I missed the point that games get this right, by and large. :D

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