Have the ability to move around UI elements on the iPad. Its very difficult to keep your finger in the middle of the movement virtual joystick when in combat. This has been a very common problem for iOS FPS-style games that utilize this control scheme.

One solution has been to have "floating" virtual joysticks that engage whenever you touch the screen in a certain range of locations so that the initial touch is always centered. Alternatively, you could just make the virtual joystick bigger so people don't fat-finger it so much :P Thanks!

-Turkot

PadButtons, draugath? ;)

+1. A display in options that allows you to drag each individual component from a list on the side of the screen to the location on the HUD would be nice. The ability to resize buttons in addition to that would be even better, with the ability to create custom buttons bound to aliases as well being the best of all.

This would require a plugin. Plugins currently cannot be loaded automatically on iOS. This requires a higher degree of technical expertise to be able to load a plugin, and I'm not aware of specifics for making it work (ie I don't have an iPad).

One solution has been to have "floating" virtual joysticks that engage whenever you touch the screen in a certain range of locations so that the initial touch is always centered.

This is a really good idea!

A very large percentage of iOS games that employ a virtual joystick have either a floating joystick or at the very least some ability to move it around built into the game. For iPad players to be even close to competitive in combat in a game like this there has to be a minimum level of customization to account for difference in hand and device sizes (ipad mini vs ipad 2-4).

Why would a plugin be needed when this sort of thing is implemented all over the App Store? Not trying to be a wise ass, I'm really asking.

Well, we already have a plugin called "DroidButtons" that was originally developed for the Android client that lets you add new touch buttons and fields to the HUD.

To be honest, it probably works on the iOS client too, if somebody can figure out how to actually install plugins. Hopefully, Soon(TM)

The iPad release is not as polished as the devs would have liked. There was a kickstarter campaign a few months back where one of the goals was to bring VO to the iPad. The funding failed, but the devs did what they could to bring it to the iPad anyway.

I believe the devs have goals to improve the mobile interface, possibly even to the point that DroidButtons becomes obsolete. For the interim, DroidButtons is a good solution created by the community (thanks draugath!) to give mobile users a way to customize the interface. Now it's just a matter of figuring out how to install and run plugins on the iPad client.

The devs had asked for feedback in the past on ideas to help improve the mobile interface, so I'm sure they are interested in this discussion.

Third party on iOS devices is a no no as far as I understand it. You're looking at only jail broken (rooted equivalent for android) being able to do that.

Plugins, while 3rd-party from the perspective of the VO client, are not 3rd-party from the perspective of the device. Plugins are written in Lua and interpreted by the client, not compiled native code. What this means is that a problem in a plugin will only potentially crash the client and not the device, which is the main issue that Apple Store policies serve to prevent. Even then, their policies are inconsistently applied and a program that was approved before may be rejected later on.

The plugin API was not removed from the iOS version, but it is not currently possible to auto-load plugins as you can do on all other platforms.