# Objective
While directional navigation is helpful for UI in general for
accessibility reasons, it is *especially* valuable for a game engine,
where menus may be navigated primarily or exclusively through the use of
a game controller.
Thumb-stick powered cursor-based navigation can work as a fallback, but
is generally a pretty poor user experience. We can do better!
## Prior art
Within Bevy, https://github.com/nicopap/ui-navigation and
https://github.com/rparrett/bevy-alt-ui-navigation-lite exist to solve
this same problem. This isn't yet a complete replacement for that
ecosystem, but hopefully we'll be there for 0.16.
## Solution
UI navigation is complicated, and the right tradeoffs will vary based on
the project and even the individual scene.
We're starting with something simple and flexible, hooking into the
existing `InputFocus` resource, and storing a manually constructed graph
of entities to explore in a `DirectionalNavigationMap` resource. The
developer experience won't be great (so much wiring to do!), but the
tools are all there for a great user experience.
We could have chosen to represent these linkages via component-flavored
not-quite-relations. This would be useful for inspectors, and would give
us automatic cleanup when the entities were despawned, but seriously
complicates the developer experience when building and checking this
API. For now, we're doing a dumb "entity graph in a resource" thing and
`remove` helpers. Once relations are added, we can re-evaluate.
I've decided to use a `CompassOctant` as our key for the possible paths.
This should give users a reasonable amount of precise control without
being fiddly, and playing reasonably nicely with arrow-key navigation.
This design lets us store the set of entities that we're connected to as
a 8-byte array (yay Entity-niching). In theory, this is maybe nicer than
the double indirection of two hashmaps. but if this ends up being slow
we should create benchmarks.
To make this work more pleasant, I've added a few utilities to the
`CompassOctant` type: converting to and from usize, and adding a helper
to find the 180 degrees opposite direction. These have been mirrored
onto `CompassQuadrant` for consistency: they should be generally useful
for game logic.
## Future work
This is a relatively complex initiative! In the hopes of easing review
and avoiding merge conflicts, I've opted to split this work into
bite-sized chunks.
Before 0.16, I'd like to have:
- An example demonstrating gamepad and tab-based navigation in a
realistic game menu
- Helpers to convert axis-based inputs into compass quadrants / octants
- Tools to check the listed graph desiderata
- A helper to build a graph from a grid of entities
- A tool to automatically build a graph given a supplied UI layout
One day, it would be sweet if:
- We had an example demonstrating how to use focus navigation in a
non-UI scene to cycle between game objects
- Standard actions for tab-style and directional navigation with a
first-party bevy_actions integration
- We had a visual debugging tool to display these navigation graphs for
QC purposes
- There was a built-in way to go "up a level" by cancelling the current
action
- The navigation graph is built completely out of relations
## Testing
- tests for the new `CompassQuadrant` / `CompassOctant` methods
- tests for the new directional navigation module
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Co-authored-by: Rob Parrett <robparrett@gmail.com>
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