Repeating a command while control is active (solution/technique)

#1 Nice post, Stephen.

#2 Very nice, looking forward to checking out the orbit cam.

#3 Orbit camera added to the resource coming up soon. I've forgotten about it, so the fault is all mine. Sorry.

Besides that, the orbit cam rocks. With a few adjustments this will be a fantastic camera mode for e.g. RTS games or action adventures.

#4 I thought of this the other day, using the gui events setting up regions and what not, pretty much everything you said, but you beat me to the punch hehe, well done Stephen!

#5 Two thumbs up, Stephen.

#6 Can someone give me some tips on how to take this theory and apply it to keyboard input?

(e.g. the camera keeps rotating as I hold down a key, not keep a mouse over a GUI control)

#7 If you look in your scripts to see how the other keys are bound you can then just write a function for the camera rotating.

Eg:

moveMap.bind( keyboard, a, moveleft );

That just says call the function moveleft when the key 'a' is pressed. You should be able to figure out the rest from there :)

#8 Let me rephrase my quandry:

The examples provided elsewhere for orbit-cams all bind camera rotation to a key, and then talk about how you can't get a key to repeat in TGE, and to take a look at this example as inspiration to come up with a solution.

However, this solution seems pretty tied to mouse events in the GUI. What I'm unable to do is extend its metaphor into the realm of keyboard interaction.

So I get how to bind keys to events, but what I don't get is how to schedule key events to repeat, as the mouse event here does. Most especially, I don't think TGE has a onKeyUp event to correlate with the mouse leaving the action region.

So, I've got an orbit camera, I've bound rotating it to keys, but I need to make it so that when I hold the j key down, it keeps on rotating until I let go.

#9 Key callbacks get called when the key goes down and again when it goes up. What you do in the interim is your own business - schedule is one possibility.

#10 Thanks Ben.

I've only been working with TGE for a day now, so I'm wondering if you can point me in a direction to better understand my options. I've been toying with schedule (as per this example) but it doesn't seem to do anything. I can't even get it into an infinite rescheduling, which I thought should have been dead easy.

If there is some docs or an example that uses this to do something similar, I'd be eternally grateful.

#11 Infinite scheduling means making the scheduled function call schedule again... an idiom, it's true, but thankfully not too tricky.

There is example code in resources, in the example app, and on the forums... I'd give you some but I probably wouldn't bother to test it, so you can probably save time by finding some working schedule code... :)

#12 Well - the repeated scheduling is actually in the example code for this thread in the top.

#13 Well then. :P

#14 Thanks for the attention guys. Combined with this thread I've gotten it all figured out.

At this stage I'm not understanding everything I'm doing, so its time for a stupid question to help me learn. Is $Gui::CurrentBounceIterationEventId an appropriate variable to be using inside the processing of keyboard events? It works, but what I'm doing seems fairly disassociated from the GUI.

For anyone looking to reply, assume I'm really really stupid. I'm not, but I kind of feel like it right now. ;-)

#15 $Gui::CurrentBounceIterationEventId - where does that come from?

#16 Nevermind, I'm stupid.

#17 Edward...

This might make more sense to you....

Not sure why Stephen didn't fully utilize the object methods but if you changed the function to this, it would more resemble what you are probably used to seeing, and you won't be setting unneeded globals...

function CatchMouseLeft::onMouseEnter(%this)
{
   // FIRST, do this now or regret it later......
   cancel(%this.iterationEventId);

   // next, do the command 
	commandToServer('MouseBounceLeft');
   
   //then, schedule the next iteration, and save the EventId for later cancel
	%this.iterationEventId = %this.schedule(50, repeatBounceLeft);
}
 
function CatchMouseLeft::onMouseLeave(%this)
{
	//  Done, cancel
	cancel(%this.iterationEventId);
}
 
 
 
function CatchMouseLeft::repeatBounceLeft(%this)
{
    // perform action
	commandToServer('MouseBounceLeft');
	
    // reschedule
	%this.iterationEventId = %this.schedule(50, repeatBounceLeft);
}

#18 @Edward: Ironically, I wound up writing this type of interface because I couldn't get keys to repeat either ;)

@Gonzo: mostly because when I wrote this advanced camera mod, it was my first attempt in not only TGE but C++ code as well (I'm an old ANSI C guy). Your technique is much more elegant.

Interesting that this topic came up by the way--I'm not currently happy with the performance/look and feel of the current implementation of rotating the orbit cam--it can stutter based on your scheduler iteration time and net lag to the server. I'm looking at modifying it to make it more "on/off": the client sends a "start rotating in this direction" on a mouse enter, and a "stop rotating" on a mouse leave event, or something along those lines. This should give a "stutter free" rotation mode to the camera, but has an added issue of a start/stop rotating command possibly being missed across the UDP socket, and having the camera seem not quite as directly controlled.

Once I get the Terrain Manager implementation I'm working on more up to speed, and probably by then the RTS pack integrated, I'll work on this style of input to the adv cam (if no one else beats me to it).

#19 LOL, funny you should mention that....

function PGLeftScroll::onMouseEnter(%this)
{
	cancel(%this.CurrentMouseEvent);
 
	turnLeft(0.075);
 
	%this.CurrentMouseEvent = %this.schedule(0, repeat, 0);
}
  
function PGLeftScroll::onMouseLeave(%this)
{
	cancel(%this.CurrentMouseEvent);
 
	turnLeft(0);
}
 
function PGLeftScroll::repeat(%this, %speed)
{
	if(%speed == 0)
	{
		%speed = 0.075;
	}
	else
	{
		%speed = 0;
	}
 
	turnLeft(%speed);
 
	%this.CurrentMouseEvent = %this.schedule(200, 0, repeat, %speed);
}

this is how I implemented the event, I think it's what you are describing, or could be with a few changes.

#20 @Edward:

Here's how I did the key repeats for the camera resource. It only uses one function, but seems to work.

function AvatarCamPitchDown(%val)
{
   if (%val) {
      commandToServer('MouseBounceDown');
      $CamPitchDownID = schedule(50,0,AvatarCamPitchDown,1);
   } else {
      cancel($CamPitchDownID);
   }
}

and ...

moveMap.bind(keyboard, "h", AvatarCamPitchDown);

Edit: ahh, [ code ] [ / code ] helps