Level: Beginner
Controls
Contents
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Keyboard (Controls)
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Mouse
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Mouse over Actor
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The Cursor
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Mobile Controls
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Example: 4 Way Motion
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The Future
Keyboard (Controls)
Detecting keyboard input works differently in Stencyl than it does in other systems. We use the notion of a Control to make your keyboard controls flexible and easy to remap.
A Control is simply a name that pertains to an action, or a “button” if you will, on a controller.
For example, if we were designing a control scheme for a Mario game, it would look like this.
The same idea applies to Stencyl, through a game’s Controls Page. To set Controls, click the Settings button, shown below, to open that dialog.
Next, click the Controls button to view the Controls pane. From there, you tell us the name of the Control and the button it maps to.
Now, when you check whether a key is pressed, released or down, instead of checking directly on a certain key (such as spacebar), you check the state of the Control.
Why do we make you go through this? Why can’t you just say the key directly?
- What if you decide to change your control scheme? You’d have to change it everywhere.
- What if you wanted to make your control scheme configurable? That would be a mess. With Controls, you just change what key the Control is mapped to.
Note: To reduce the amount of setup, all Stencyl games come pre-shipped with a default set of controls. You’re free to edit them, delete them, etc.
Mouse
Mouse input is detected through 3 different states.
Pressed and Released are one-off “events” - they fire once per that action, whereas “down” is a constant state that can be checked.
You can also grab the (x,y) location of the mouse on screen or any recent presses/releases.
Mouse over Actor
Similarly, mouse input over an actor involves 4 different states.
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Pressed on Actor
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Released on Actor
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Down on Actor
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Over Actor
Over Actor is our term for hovering the mouse over the actor.
The Cursor
Sometimes, you want to hide the cursor or display a custom cursor. How do you do this?
To show or hide the cursor, use this block.
Mini-Challenge: How would you create a custom cursor? One method is to hide the cursor and create a dummy actor that continually follows the mouse but does not collide with anything.
Mobile Controls
We've covered this separately.
Example: 4 Way Motion
This example shows a simple use-case for Keyboard controls.
Up/Down/Left/Right are pre-defined controls that come with each game - they are not to be mixed up with the actual, literal keys by the same name.
Mini-Challenges
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One drawback of this simple approach is that you can walk diagonally. How would you fix this?
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In this version, the player stops immediately after you lift the keys. Implement a version where the player slows down gradually.
The Future
Although abstracting keys is powerful and flexible, some developers have expressed a desire to work with fixed keys. In a future version of Stencyl, we’ll add the ability to choose a key directly, rather than an abstract control.
We’ll also be consolidating Mouse and Touch input into a single set of blocks to simplify the porting process from Web to Mobile.
Summary
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Detect key events by creating abstract controls and checking the state those controls.
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Controls let you change the control scheme for your game from one place.
Challenge: Button
Create a button that responds to Mouse controls but goes beyond just a one liner "when pressed, do something".
The button should work just like a regular button. Specifically, don’t register a button click unless the gesture was both started and completed on the button.
Food for Thought: Think of scenarios where simply detecting a release would be incorrect.
Challenge: Cutscenes
There’s a nifty block for simulating key presses and releases. It’s useful for creating on-screen buttons in mobile games that can act as if they were physical keyboard buttons.
It’s also useful for creating cutscenes. Make a cutscene using this block.
Last Updated: 2012-07-24 by Ceric
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