Keyboard and Joystick/Xbox controller homogeneous keystrokes

Game Mechanics
#1

I had an idea for my game engine to simultaneously take in Keyboard and xbox controller input. But there would be a conflict for people who want jumping to be the same key for the xbox controller, without checking for both. I was also thinking of people implementing a GUI in game for changing the keys/input to do another thing. Would people need to make their own input controller, or something? It has to be API-level, so its easy to use.

#2

Quite hard to understand, (it would be nice if you could be more explicitly) but I think you mean that people can set spacebar and R1 as jumping (for example).
Well that shouldn’t be a problem since if you get input, you check if it is spacebar/R1 and if so, toggle the jumping boolean.


boolean jumping = false;
public void keyPressed(int keyCode){
   if(keyCode == spacebar)
      jumping = true;
}

public void controllerButtonPressed(int keyCode){
   if(keyCode == R1)
      jumping = true;
}

Just very simple but what I try to say is that if you use the same variables (like I did with jumping) you shouldn’t have a problem.

#3

I meant, for example; Pressing start takes you to the pause menu. Opening the pause menu takes a bit of code to create, so I was thinking of ‘linking’ certain keys to some kind of ‘action’. And in game, you can see a list of actions, and their linked keys. And you can link new keys to it.

#4

Yeah, that’s what is called key mapping. You map buttons to intentions.
Pretty basic stuff, you should make a key-value collection for them where the key is the button and the value is the intention. When the user presses a button check if it’s in the collection, if it is run the respective intention. If you want to make the player able to use both a keyboard and a controller without the need of remapping the intentions from one to the other all the time make 2 collections, one for the keyboard and one for the controller and in the input check stage check for both collections. Again, pretty straight forward stuff. :slight_smile: