42
Yes, this is normal for a real-time game to try to use 100% CPU to perform as fast and good as it can. So that player sees as much frames per second or as good physics simulation or anything else as his PC can provide.
In your case - No, this looks like an inefficient design, to take a thread and make it poll for events in a loop (while true do ...
37
Yes, when you want your game to run on PC, you should think from an early design stage on how to best utilize the mouse. The same applies to the input features of all other platforms you consider targeting.
One of the main differences between a good port and a bad port to a different platform is how much effort you invested into accommodating the different ...
34
Although you are targeting desktops, there will be players on (gaming) laptops and for some of them, it will be an inconvenience to get a mouse before being able to play your game. It would sound like a good thing to me, if you were to support alternative control schemes or customizable controls.
This is not a very "sciency" answer - I've just run into this ...
31
To simulate a time lag, use a circular buffer to store the last N frames' mouse positions. Store the current mouse position each frame. In your control calculations, use the oldest mouse position from the buffer instead of the current mouse position.
29
You can't. At least, not as a game developer.
As a gamer, you can purchase more expensive keyboards with "anti-ghosting" features, but otherwise the limitation is part of the hardware itself, so there's nothing you can do in software to solve it.
Check out this demo page to see how keyboard ghosting works, plus a demo: https://web.archive.org/web/...
28
This is Matt, the creator of Trainyard. @DMGregory summoned me here! :)
It sounds like you're working through the same issues I had to deal with. It's a tricky problem where there isn't necessarily a perfect solution.
One thing to consider is the constraints of the problem. I was targeting a 50mm wide screen on the early iPhones, and Apple's recommendation ...
22
Split this into several layers.
At the lowest layer you have raw input events from the OS. SDL keyboard input, mouse input, joystick input, etc. You might have several platforms (SDL is a least-common-denominator lacking several input forms, for instance, which you might later care about).
You can abstract these with a very low-level custom event type, ...
22
It really depends what you mean by "assume". Are you making this assumption at the point of designing your gameplay mechanics? Or at the point of deciding whether or not to implement fully customizable key bindings?
You could mean "I assume real gamers have a 3 button mouse, therefore I don't need to offer the option to rebind bayonet-thrust to a keyboard ...
19
Keyboards have hardware limitations on how many keys can be pressed and recognized at the same time.
Your code is not the problem here, it's most likely the design of the keyboard.
17
If you stop calling it "pushing forward" on the joystick/mouse, and start calling it "pushing up" (which is the way that most players think of it -- particularly the ones who don't play flight simulators), then the "invert Y axis" name makes complete sense, since pushing up causes the player to look down.
Edit:
The fundamental issue here is people's mental ...
15
What is often used is an intermediate Intent System which abstracts the input and keeps track of the context and relevant gamestates.
The Intent system will stop transmitting inputs when the simulation is paused for example.
It also handles the mapping between controller events and intents (move in direction, run, shoot, reload...).
This way your other ...
12
Since asked by the thread starter, I elaborate on event managers. I think this is a good way to handle input in a game.
An event manager is a global class which allows to both register callback functions to keys and to fire off those callbacks. The event manager stores registered functions in a private list grouped by their key. Each time a key gets fired, ...
11
An SDL_KEYDOWN event is only sent when the key is first pressed. You will receive an SDL_KEYUP event when it's released.
You'll want to handle moving in code which gets called every frame, not in response to an event. Inside Avatar::handle_input, you'll instead want to set variables to tell you whether each key is up or down, and update those variables as ...
11
Keyboards have a key matrix, where the buttons have been arranged into something roughly square, with the keyswitches each being tied to one row and one column. The keyboard activates each row and then reads the columns. If you sketch this out you will see that some button combinations must activate "phantom" keys. You can fix this with one diode per button (...
10
How about you use a Queue<T>?
There are 4 significant members of Queue<T> you can use:
Queue.Enqueue(T item) - put your item at the end of the queue.
T Queue.Peek() - look at the first item without removing it.
T Queue.Dequeue() - get and remove the first item.
Queue.Count - check how many items are in queue.
Sample usage
Here's what could ...
10
This is actually really simple. All you have to do is add another ClickListener which listens for Right Clicks (the default only listens to left clicks). To do this all you have to do is this:
someButton.addListener(new ClickListener(Buttons.RIGHT)
{
@Override
public void clicked(InputEvent event, float x, float y)
{
//do whatever
}
}...
10
Many laptops lack a middle button, especially those with a trackpad, and you need special software to emulate it.
Mac laptops have only one button. Right-click is pretty easy (two finger click) and not uncommon in Mac games, and the two finger drag to scroll isn't bad, but only in slower paced games. However, there is no concept of a middle click in the ...
9
Your problem is the fact that you're only looking at KEYDOWN events.
What you need to do is toggle a boolean value when a key is pressed or released.
Something like this would work:
# event loop
for event in pygame.event.get():
if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
sys.exit()
elif event.type == pygame.KEYDOWN: # check for key ...
9
Moving the joystick in a complete circle gives you the upper bounds of the joystick range, but the at rest (i.e. no input) position of the joystick can't be accurately determined from those values.
You could assume that that rest position is the exact center of the available range but that is only true in ideal circumstances. Over time controllers wear in ...
9
A game with a constant active window refresh will mostly be ran in full-screen mode and be the only (big) program of the machine managed by the OS. So it is totally acceptable to use 100% of CPU, because nothing else should need it.
However, that doesn't means of course you have to always use 100% whatever your game state. Most game loops use a sleep method ...
9
There are a few drawbacks of aiming to use all available CPU time in a PC or mobile game.
System requirements: Even if a game is playable on the PC where you develop your game, it might not be playable on a weaker PC owned by someone who bought your game. Limiting CPU use will keep a game usable on machines that more people are likely to already have. If ...
8
The network layer needs to have an agreed-upon clock. They can agree upon a clock value early in the game (and resync it periodically in case of drift) so the host knows how long any particular packet took to actually arrive and when the client did the action, and vice versa.
See this article for one possible way to synchronize clocks in games. There are ...
8
Firstly, you need to use a switch case statement and decide which direction overrides the others, for example, if they press all four buttons, which button should be listened to for input? This gets put in order within the switch statements.
Edit: For clarity about the above statement. You do need to use a switch case statement (or similar structural logic) ...
7
In a word: Swiping.
I played Pac-Man championship edition on my Android phone and what I thought really worked for it is that while there was an on screen joystick, you didn't actually have to touch it to move Pac-Man in the proper direction. If your finger fell off the joystick it didn't matter. All that mattered is in what direction you moved your finger.
...
7
The usual way to handle this is that every time a bullet is fired you set some variable to your cooldown time. Every frame you decrement that variable by the frame time. If you try to fire and that value is greater than 0, you just ignore the fire input event.
If that feels bad, a next step is to queue up a "they want to fire" action if they try to ...
7
The entity component system (ECS) is great. There are plenty of misunderstandings about it though. For example, it's perfectly fine to use event/messages in an ECS. People often think you're supposed to completely avoid inheritance too. Also not true. The ECS methodology is just a strategy for avoiding issues that come with a large hierarchy of inheritance. ...
6
This is essentially the same (update your input around 30+ times per second). If you update less often, you'll experience "input lag."
This is even more noticeable when a game uses a hardware cursor and has some icon following the cursor (such as during drag-and-drop operations). You'll most likely see the icon lagging behind.
In the end this really ...
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