Handling keyboard input

[Fromethius]

Hi everyone.

For the past day I've been trying to find a good way to handle keyboard input.

Naturally, I wanted to just use WM_KEYDOWN and WM_KEYUP to handle my events, but they proven to have limitations. In my game there was a keyboard delay. If you pressed and held down the right arrow key, the character would move one pixel to the right, stop, then continue moving. I wanted the character to immediately start moving and continue moving once the right arrow key was pressed and held.

Another problem with using just WM_KEYDOWN is that if you are moving your character with the right arrow key and then press spacebar, your character stops moving. Apparently this WM_KEYDOWN message couldn't handle more than one key being processed at a time.

I look into DirectInput and get it working finally. I notice there is none of that keyboard repeat rate delay and it could handle more than one key being held at a time. The problem was, it was messy. Basically, DirectInput was overkill. Also, handling KeyUp messages with DirectInput was hell.

Now I look into GetAsyncKeyState. It looks good, but it seems a bit messy and slow.


Overall, I'm looking for a way to use WM_KEYDOWN and WM_KEYUP to handle more than one key at a time (so if you're moving and press space you don't stop moving for example) and I also want it to not have a delay. For example, the instant I press the right arrow key my character starts moving and doesn't stop.


The only method I found for doing this so far required a messy array of bools I didn't really want to get into. It was worse than using DirectInput or GetAsyncKeyState in my opinion.


Thanks