[racket-dev] multiple key-press

From: Matthias Felleisen (matthias at ccs.neu.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 22 09:32:16 EDT 2010

I have considered this issue. I decided that these kinds of kids should be introduced to Universe programs as opposed to World programs. That's way cooler than silly one-keyboard games. 



-- Matthias





On Jul 22, 2010, at 9:29 AM, Jay McCarthy wrote:

> As far as I know, at the lowest level there is no "multiple key press"
> event even in the OS.
> 
> If they want to do that, they should change their world to record the
> "current key press state":
> 
> (define-struct the-world (keys . everything-else))
> 
> and at the start of `on-tick' look at the collective impact of all the
> keys, resetting it to 'empty' when the new world is returned.
> 
> That's more like how actually game engines work anyways.
> 
> Jay
> 
> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 7:25 AM, Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk at cs.brown.edu> wrote:
>> I just spoke with a room of high-school students studying Universe
>> programming in a summer course at Brown.
>> 
>> One major complaint was that they couldn't do multi-key-presses.  For
>> instance, they want to use WASD navigation combined with a right-side
>> key for firing, and want to be able to fire and navigate at the "same
>> time".
>> 
>> They've been using Shift, but the general consensus amongst the kids
>> was this was Not Cool.  Basically, they felt like they were being
>> cheated out of building a "real game".
>> 
>> I don't know what it would take to support this.
>> 
>> Shriram
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Jay McCarthy <jay at cs.byu.edu>
> Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University
> http://teammccarthy.org/jay
> 
> "The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93
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