I've always wanted to know a good way of handling input and translating it into the game smart and easy (May sound wrong but by handling input I was more focused on where to put the keydown checks etc not how to handle input). Sure you could just check if the key was pressed etc at different places but I feel that its pretty god damn ugly and nasty. So I thought about writing an EventManager. I would bind for example Space to an enumerator, lets say PlayerEvents and rolled it to Player_Jump and each frame that key was checked to be pressed or held down or whatever the flag is set to, it will place that enumerator into an event vector. I have a function that gets the list of all the enumerator events that have been sent to the event manager and will alow the coder to handle them. Then as usual when writing something new you come up with something, why not just use the already existing windows messaging system instead of writing your own? Ideas? Suggestions? [edited by - Cybrosys on May 27, 2003 9:12:37 PM]

Lets take q1 for example, you bind a key to a certain command, say +jump. What is that exactly? Each time i press the space-key a +jump message is sent but to where and how is it managed? Thats what I would like to know. That was what I was trying to copy be creating an event manager.

Each frame I would run through each input device and check if any of the keys are down etc and if so is there a message binded to that key. If so then send that message of to the EventManager that stores the event untill next frame when the event will be handled.

HL uses this kinda system and i gather from the way it works the setup is this :

on start up build a table of actions -> function bindings ("+jump" -> IN_Jump() for example)
The parse the config files and where you see +Jump you bind the input so that when that key is pressed the function IN_Jump() is called.

Might need a bit of refine ment but you get the general idea.
The intresting thing about this system is that if your binding code and calling code was reasonably abstract you could in theory set the whole thing up with a script and completely change how the game works.

q1 key presses:

Press Key
|
insert command for keypress from
key binding table into the command buffer
(the one you also use for console input)
|
The command buffer is executed and cleared
the next frame.

you can execute all key events directly in
the console, by typing in the command a key
is bound to.

The hole thing is i''m trying to write my code entirely oop. This means that there will be no functions outside classes. Binding functions by using void points isnt doable if the function is in a class. The program has no way of telling if the functions memory address is correct because it doesnt know if the class has been alocated. That''s why I couldnt just have a list of void pointers or such binded to keys since all the functions are inside classes. If I try the compiler will get mad

In any case I finished my CEventManager and CInputManager to a certain degree so that I could test it. Right now it only supports keyboard bindings. I bind a key to a certain unsigned long number (enum message) and a flag for what state the key should be in. Each loop I iterate through all the keys and if any of them is binded I check the flag and if that keystate is correct to the flag. If so I send away this unsigned long to the event manager so that the programmer has to handle it.

My first bind
InputManager()->BindKeyboardKey(DIK_ESCAPE, E_QUIT, IS_RELEASED);
Worked like a charm And admit it, the code has a nice look towards it ^^

Ah well, heading off to read some articles that got suggested here and read up on ActionMapping.. l8 guys