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So, I've got a fighting game with some pretty tight input windows, and I'd like to buffer the inputs for a few frames.

Basically, if the fighter is in the neutral state, pressing attack should lead into an attack. It uses Input.GetButtonDown("attack") to get the button, and if it detects a press, transitions into attacking state. Now, let's suppose the fighter has just landed, and ends up hitting "attack" a few frames before the land animation ends and he transitions back into neutral. As of right now, nothing would happen, since he's not in the neutral state where the check is, and when he enters the state, the button press is no longer happening.

Is there a way to store inputs for a few frames, so that I can read a button press a few frames back? So, instead of using Input.GetButtonDown("attack"), it'd be something like InputBuffer.KeyBuffered("attack",12) to see if the button was pressed within 12 frames?

The example above is just a bit of a simplification, I know for the above situation I could just use GetButton instead of GetButtonDown, but for a fighting game, you can imagine that the necessary inputs to buffer would get significantly more complicated.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ It sounds to me like your design should be altered slightly to track manually whether or not a button was pressed; i.e. check 12 frames back if the button was pressed, or rather store all buttons that were pressed manually in the window that the input would be allowed. Sorry if I'm not understanding the question \$\endgroup\$
    – James Hurley
    Jan 29, 2017 at 0:17
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    \$\begingroup\$ Yes, you have the means to write an InputBuffer yourself that does exactly what you describe. It would use the typical Input.GetButtonDown() etc. to detect presses, then store them in a format that preserves what you need (eg. a frame ID for each button's last press, or a ring buffer of the last n presses, or...). There's not much trick to it other than configuring Unity's script execution order to ensure it runs first (so you don't have scripts querying it & getting inconsistent inputs at different moments in the frame). Do you need any particular help in implementing this? \$\endgroup\$
    – DMGregory ♦
    Jan 29, 2017 at 0:50

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As suggested in the comments, you can buffer frame inputs for when you're ready to process them. In your update method:

if (attacking && Input.GetButtonDown("attack"))
{
    queue.Enqueue(InputEnum.Attack);
}

When the time comes for you to act on the input, you can simply pop from the queue and proceed according to what you find. This assumes that you care about every input (and the order in which they arrived). If you only need to consider the first input made during the attack, you don't even need a queue/buffer.

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