Design choices

Design and ideas behind this library.

Polling

This library’s goal is to enable a polling-based paradigm on input handling. Inputs come from mouse, keyboard, gamepad, touch screen, etc. Polling means that you can check for an input’s current state anywhere that feels natural in your game code instead of managing them through events and callbacks.

Abstraction

For an input button, the state can either be on or off. It’s useful to know when the state becomes on and when the state becomes off. This library defines the moment a state becomes on as Pressed and the moment the state becomes off as Released. It also defines the exclusive state in between those as HeldOnly. When either Pressed or HeldOnly are true, this is defined as Held. These are included in the ICondition interface.

Tracking

This library comes with a built-in tracking system. This allows you to resolve conflicts between different ICondition instances that reuse the same keys or buttons. The tracking system is opt-in and separated into it’s own namespace at Apos.Input.Track. To accommodate it, ICondition offers an optional parameter canConsume in Pressed(canConsume = true), Held(canConsume = true), HeldOnly(canConsume = true), and Released(canConsume = true). This optional parameter allows you to handle the tracking yourself by setting canConsume to false and calling Consume() manually.