Project Eleuthia (#268)

* project eleuthia

* Rename

* Add link

site/content/entry/yuzu-applet-overlays/index.md

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+date = "2021-04-03T01:00:00+05:30"
+title = "New Feature Release - Applet Overlays"
+author = "CaptV0rt3x"
+forum = 387809
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+
+Hey there, yuz-ers!
+Have you ever thought of enjoying yuzu on your TV, relaxing on your couch, but found our user interface cumbersome?
+Thanks to the efforts of our developers [Morph](https://github.com/Morph1984) and [Rei](https://github.com/Its-Rei), yuzu has taken a massive step forward in making couch gaming comfy.
+Let's dig in!
+<!--more-->
+
+# What is this about?
+
+For a while now, users have complained that yuzu's couch setup (full-screen, TV, controller) experience isn't as comfortable as it could be.
+One pain point was that pop-ups of any kind can't be addressed with a controller.
+On top of that, these pop-up windows were separate background processes that wouldn't appear until you exited full-screen mode.
+As you can guess, you always had to have a keyboard and mouse handy.
+
+{{< imgs
+    "./error_old.png| Old error applet"
+>}}
+{{< imgs
+    "./error_new.png| New controller friendly error applet"
+>}}
+
+To fix this once and for all, Rei started work on eliminating all pop-up windows and to make it possible to control all system messages with a controller.
+It was during this time that Morph began working on rewriting our software keyboard applet.
+And since the software keyboard applet wasn't controller friendly either, they both collaborated and redesigned it from the ground up.
+
+{{< imgs
+    "./swkbd_old.png| Old software keyboard applet"
+>}}
+{{< imgs
+    "./swkbd_new.mp4| New controller friendly software keyboard applet"
+>}}
+
+# The Software Keyboard
+
+As many of you might know, the Switch has a software keyboard that allows players to input text into games.
+What you might not know is that there are multiple variants of keyboards implemented within the Switch's Horizon OS.
+For example, there is the full-screen keyboard, which pauses games and allows input, and there is the inline keyboard, which allows input while the game is running.
+
+Our old software keyboard implementation was just the bare minimum required by the full-screen variant and, due to its design, was difficult to add support for the other variants.
+It also quickly became outdated due to the newer revisions of the applet that shipped with later Switch firmware updates.
+Equipped with the knowledge and expertise from previously rewriting two other applets - namely, the browser applet & the controller applet - Morph set out to rewrite the entire software keyboard applet from scratch.
+
+Rei had meticulously designed the new overlays for the keyboard applet and they turned out to be absolutely stunning.
+Now, all that was left was to implement the keyboard applet backend and connect it to the frontend — but then came the challenges.
+
+{{< single-title-imgs
+    "The new software keyboard layouts for each yuzu theme"
+    "./osk_ssbu_line_white.png"
+    "./osk_ssbu_line_midnight.png"
+    "./osk_ssbu_line_dark.png"
+>}}
+
+# Challenges
+
+As mentioned earlier, our old implementation was not designed with multi-variant support in mind.
+With the rewrite, our foundational goal was to ensure all keyboard variants were supported.
+A major challenge was figuring out how the inline keyboard variant worked.
+In contrast to the full-screen variant, this one worked asynchronously.
+
+Applets run as separate processes on the Switch, but games have a habit of pausing their processes, invoking the keyboard applet, and making it seem synchronous.
+There are several more applets that work asynchronously in addition to the inline keyboard variant.
+As such, Morph spent a lot of time and effort on testing how the applet worked on original hardware — figuring out how all the pieces fall into place, making optimizations, and thus slowly perfected the backend implementation.
+
+{{< imgs
+    "./mhgu_line_swkbd.mp4| Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate - Inline Keyboard in action"
+>}}
+{{< imgs
+    "./swsh_num_swkbd.mp4| Pokémon Sword/Shield - Numeric Keyboard in action"
+>}}
+
+With the backend in place, a new set of challenges arose due to yuzu's frontend library, [Qt](https://www.qt.io/).
+Qt has a **lot** of annoying quirks, such as window positioning, transparency, and more.
+These took several days of testing to track down and resolve.
+For the frontend, Morph and Rei also had to plan and account for various other things like game specific keyboard scaling, high DPI displays, and higher resolutions.
+
+The final and most important challenge was figuring out how to make the applet controller friendly.
+Thanks to the efforts spent in planning and testing at various stages of development, our devs were able to overcome these challenges.
+
+# Extra
+
+Although the overlay dialogs were initially designed with the keyboard applet in mind, the devs soon discovered its potential as a replacement for pop-up windows.
+Thanks to this, the error applet has now joined the list of controller friendly applets, with more to come soon.
+The error applet is used by games to crash and report back error codes to the user in various scenarios, which was previously done via a pop-up window.
+
+{{< single-title-imgs
+    "The new error applet overlays for each yuzu theme"
+    "./error_white.png"
+    "./error_midnight.png"
+    "./error_dark.png"
+>}}
+
+# Fin
+
+Both the new keyboard applet and the controller friendly error applet are now available in the [latest Early Access build](https://yuzu-emu.org/help/early-access/).
+Since these are currently still under development, we would like to hear more about your experiences and any bugs/issues you might encounter.
+Please don't hesitate to reach out to us on our Discord server's Patreon support channels to report any findings.
+That's all we have for today but, we're sure to be back with more exciting news soon!
+
+&nbsp;
+<h4 style="text-align:center;">
+<b>Please consider supporting us on [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/yuzuteam)!<br>
+If you would like to contribute to this project, check out our [GitHub](https://github.com/yuzu-emu/yuzu)!</b>
+</h4>