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Using touch screens with FPS

This is out of curiosity (and a desire to actually own one), but do touch screens give an advantage in FPS's? If the finger tap counts as a mouse click, does that mean the cursor immediately jumps to the location of the tap, and if so, does your aim immediately jump to that position? Or does the game need programmed to be able to handle touch-screens? Looking for people with first-hand experience.

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APrough
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    I do not have one of these so I can not answer. What I can say though is the response resolution of touch screens is no where near as responsive as a mouse though. That alone may make it a significant disadvantage and should be something to add into your question. – James Jul 06 '12 at 17:37
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    ^James is right, think about it, twitching your wrist is a lot faster than moving your arm to the other side of the screen. You should just stick to a mouse for FPS's. Games like Minecraft might be more fun though. – hammythepig Jul 06 '12 at 18:09

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No, simply because of how FPS games track your movement. touch in fact doesn't work with most FPS games at all, pointing with touch will instead make your view spazz out.

This happens because most FPS games are using mouse axis movement to move the camera, your mouse isn't acting as a pointer on X by Y pixels anymore, it's instead tracking movement as if it were a joystick. Movements picked up by the touch screen will result in extreme and impossible to control movements in many FPS games. You can't just touch someone to shoot them unless the game has been specifically designed for touch.

Source: I've had a multitouch/inductive pen touch screen for 6 years. No FPS game has ever worked except for certain flash games which don't use the axis movement like "real" FPS games. Stuff like Half Life, Counter Strike ect all exhibit the "spazz" movements when given touch events.

Ben Brocka
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  • If you tweak your resolution/mouse sensitivity properly you can almost definitely get a 1-1 correspondence between aim and location. – Decency Jul 07 '12 at 01:53
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    @Decency: I think you're still not understanding how it works. DirectInput uses relative positioning, meaning touchscreens will not work, at any sensitivity. – BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft Jul 07 '12 at 02:13
  • @BlueRaja-DannyPflughoeft ahhh, relative positioning, that's what it's called, thank you. – Ben Brocka Jul 07 '12 at 03:40
  • @Ben Brocka, the relative positioning aspect of the mouse is very clear, and that is what I was looking for. However, does finger-drag operations work as intended? – APrough Jul 08 '12 at 14:40
  • @APrough no, because you're still forcing the mouse into an absolute position, which causes similar impossible movement. – Ben Brocka Jul 08 '12 at 20:42
  • @BlueRaja-DannyPflughoeft Still not quite understanding. If I press the screen slightly to the right of center in an FPS, why would it not jump my view to the right? As long as you reset the absolute positioning after each mouseread I don't see why it couldn't work fine in theory. – Decency Jul 09 '12 at 05:55
  • @Decency think of the mouse cursor as locked in the top left of the screen in an FPS. If you try and touch left of the center of the screen, instead of a slight adjustment, you're moving several thousand pixels instantly, which often results in you looking directly at your feet/the sky – Ben Brocka Jul 09 '12 at 13:48
  • @BenBrocka Right, so tweak your sensitivity until those several thousand pixels are as many pixels as you'd have moved your cursor manually. – Decency Jul 09 '12 at 17:59