If you just read the keyboard state unbuffered, you are going to run into this problem no matter when you read the keyboard. Reading the state, of course, just tells you what the state is at that one moment in time when you actually call GetDeviceState (I assume that''s how you''re doing it?)

In most cases, you should use buffered data. Look into IDirectInputDevice7::GetDeviceData instead of IDirectInputDevice7::GetDeviceState. You''ll also have to set the buffer size first using IDirectInputDevice7::SetProperty. Look into the DX7 help files for exact usage information.

I'm not sure what your basic input processing strategy is, so I'm not sure exactly how large your buffer should be. I suggest you integrate some buffered-read code into your input handling system and then play around with the buffer size. Of course, keep in mind that depending upon how the timing of your game works and how often it reads and flushes the buffered data... other users of your software may buffer overflow before you do when using the same buffer-size, so its better to go with a slightly larger buffer than would be needed in most circumstances.

Also take a look at the structure documentation for DIDEVICEOBJECTDATA (which are what you get back from GetDeviceData). Each entry has a sequence number and a time stamp, either of which could be used to determine which buffered data should be processed or not based on some rules you have decided upon. Again... I'm not sure exactly how you want your input to work, but you could use this information to determine that the user has pressed KEY1 after KEY2, and thus the press on KEY2 should be ignored because its obsolete for whatever reason.




Edited by - gmcbay on 4/21/00 5:27:36 PM