Visual Basic 2008 KeyDown Delay? [RESOLVED]

[Exiled]

Hey everybody, I've been doing Visual Basic game development for about 7 months now. I've never actually tried making an RPG style game before, but now I am attempting to accomplish it. I've always used the KeyDown event for checking if a key is pressed to move your character. However, when you do hold a key down, it responds as if in a text program... It sends the key once, waits, then continues going. I would like to remove this delay within the program, but nowhere else. I would also like to remove it without having to change the user's settings. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks!

[Ginto8]

What you should do is have to subs that handle KeyDown and KeyUp events respectively, and some sort of structure/class for holding key states, then have those 2 subs update the keystates, and have a timer-activated sub that uses them. At least that's how I do it.

Also, check out KeyPress events. I'm not sure, but they seem more likely to have key repeat than KeyDown events.

[Exiled]

That's pretty much what I do. But I'm talking about the delay when you hold the key down. I might just not understand exactly what you said. And I've attempted to work with KeyPress but I couldn't find a working solution to execute the same code that my KeyDown event does.

[Ginto8]

well if you control the key state something like this:

Code: Select all

private sub onDown(...) handles KeyDown
   state.<key> = true 
end sub

private sub onUp(...) handles KeyUp
   state.<key> = false
end sub

then it should reliably tell you when a certain key is currently being pressed. You can take advantage of this in a sub that handles a Timer.Tick event:

Code: Select all

private withevents t as Timer
sub New()
    t = new Timer(...)
    t.start()
end sub
private sub frameLogic() handles t.Tick
    ' do stuff
end sub

[Exiled]

I haven't attempted it yet, but will it remove the delay and tell me if the key is being pressed or held down?

[Exiled]

Hm... When I executed the code, it produced the same delay..

[Ginto8]

it shouldn't produce a delay if you actually have some sort of way of storing the state and you use other subs (read: not onDown and onUp) to check the key states for different things. If you keep using onDown and onUp for logic, there will be a delay.

[Exiled]

Ah, I modified the code a little bit and it worked! Thanks :D