Virtual keyboard support

While a physically attached keyboard is common on desktop PC, they are rare on console and when cloud streaming to another console or mobile device. As text entry can be critical to a game, the GDK provides two different solutions to handle text input using a virtual keyboard. For most games, the best solutions is to rely on XGameUiShowTextEntryAsync. For games that need to render multi-line text or the input of more than 1024 characters, they can rely on XGameUiTextEntryOpen.

The following table provides a comparison between these two solutions.

Description XGameUiShowTextEntryAsync XGameUiTextEntryOpen
Multi-line support No Yes
Maximum number of characters 1024 1024 * 32
Input focus Virtual keyboard gets input focus Virtual keyboard gets input focus
Positioning Fixed position Positional by the game
Text rendering Handled by the virtual keyboard Handled by the game
Cloud streaming behavior Leverage the virtual keyboard on the client Rendered by streaming server

See also

XGameUiShowTextEntryAsync
XGameUiTextEntryOpen