Just thinking out loud: Custom Keyboard Controls

Hi guys.

I was just messing around with changing the control keys for Player 1 in the Layout properties in the editor, so I could test my game with various sets of controls, and I got thinking.

I know that there's a plugin for custom controls (not sure if it's stable, finished or appropriate), but I was wondering how difficult it would be for the guys who are now updating C1 to allow us access to those properties at runtime.

It would then be simple for us to program our games to allow the user to decide which key was for which action.

Any thoughts on this?

It just seems like the ability is there to change it in the editor, so surely it wouldn't be too hard to allow us to set those same properties at runtime.

Krush.

InputSystem plugin sems to be fine?

InputSystem plugin sems to be fine?

Well, I don't know if it is, as I haven't looked into it.

I remember one of the input plugins had problems, and I don't want to introduce a buggy plugin into a major project at this late stage.

I will do a search on the plugin and see what the general consensus is.

But my point remains valid.

For a simple way of redefining controls, all we need is access to the properties of player 1 at runtime that we have at edit-time.

Should be simple to implement.

Krush.

Should be simple to implement.

Not necessarily. The InputSystem plugin could very well be an indicator of the very opposite.

I haven't had any problems with the Input System plugin so far. I'd say go ahead and use that. Even if they could add the functionality to the MouseKeyboard object (simple or not) I imagine there's stuff that have higher priority before they'd get to that.

The InputSystem plugin looks good, and the author seems to have responded with fixes when bugs were found.

But it is still beta, and loading the 3rd example that comes with the plugin shows a strange behaviour when detecting a click on a text field.

It seems to be miscalculating where the text field is, and you need to click above the text for it to register.

This is why I mentioned a simple plugin that gave us access to the same drop-down choices we have in the editor.

Plugins that try to do everything are great, but obviously they are prone to a lot more bugs, and most of the time they are overkill when you're just looking for a single feature.

I was hoping that one of the devs (or caretaker devs) would join in this discussion.

I will test InputSystem to destruction, and hopefully find it'll do the job without any problems, and then consider adding it to my project.

For anyone who doesn't know what I'm referring to when I talk about the player controls at edit-time, I'm talking about the drop-down lists at the bottom of the left panel in the Application Properties, where you choose which key is used for left, right, jump, etc.

If we just had access to those drop-down choices during runtime, user-defined keyboard controls would be simple to implement without the need for plugins.

If I'm honest, it's one of the things that I thought should have been in Construct from the very beginning, because it's something that almost every game has.

Krush.