Clockwork Chilli - Wade Game Engine Forums

oranjoose September 14th, 2016

This one's not too important, but it appears that key events handle only offer keycodes, rather than keystrings or a key enum. If this is the case, is that by design, to keep Wade as small and use as little memory as possible? That's fair if that's the reason.

To elaborate on what I mean, you could take an associative key array such as:

keys = {
8: 'BACKSPACE',
9: 'TAB',
13: 'ENTER',
16: 'SHIFT',
17: 'CTRL',
18: 'ALT',
19: 'PAUSE',
20: 'CAPS_LOCK',
27: 'ESC',
32: 'SPACE',
33: 'PAGE_UP',
34: 'PAGE_DOWN',
35: 'END',
36: 'HOME',
37: 'LEFT',
38: 'UP',
39: 'RIGHT',
40: 'DOWN',
44: 'PRINT_SCREEN',
45: 'INSERT',
46: 'DELETE',
48: '0',
49: '1',
50: '2',
51: '3',
52: '4',
53: '5',
54: '6',
55: '7',
56: '8',
57: '9',
65: 'A',
66: 'B',
67: 'C',
68: 'D',
69: 'E',
70: 'F',
71: 'G',
72: 'H',
73: 'I',
74: 'J',
75: 'K',
76: 'L',
77: 'M',
78: 'N',
79: 'O',
80: 'P',
81: 'Q',
82: 'R',
83: 'S',
84: 'T',
85: 'U',
86: 'V',
87: 'W',
88: 'X',
89: 'Y',
90: 'Z',
96: 'NUM_ZERO',
97: 'NUM_ONE',
98: 'NUM_TWO',
99: 'NUM_THREE',
100: 'NUM_FOUR',
101: 'NUM_FIVE',
102: 'NUM_SIX',
103: 'NUM_SEVEN',
104: 'NUM_EIGHT',
105: 'NUM_NINE',
106: 'NUM_MULTIPLY',
107: 'NUM_PLUS',
109: 'NUM_MINUS',
110: 'NUM_PERIOD',
111: 'NUM_DIVISION',
112: 'F1',
113: 'F2',
114: 'F3',
115: 'F4',
116: 'F5',
117: 'F6',
118: 'F7',
119: 'F8',
120: 'F9',
121: 'F10',
122: 'F11',
123: 'F12',
186: 'SEMICOLON',
187: 'PLUS',
189: 'MINUS',
192: 'BACK_TICK',
222: 'SINGLE_QUOTE'
}

and then assign to the event's parameter, data.key to keys[data.keyCode] to get the proper key name. This would prevent the developer from having to look up keycodes and potentially have non-descriptive code. For example, data.key == "SHIFT" looks better than data.keyCode == 16.

Alternatively, you could have a reverse associative array to act as an enum to check against the keycode. For example, you could have wade.KEY = { BACKSPACE: 8, TAB: 9, ... }, and then developers can check data.keyCode == wade.KEY.TAB or whatever.

Again, not critical. Just commenting.

oranjoose September 23rd, 2016

Wow, you even added this to Wade version 3.3!

For reference to the passerby, the data object that is passed to the onKeyDown event in a SceneObject now has a keyName property representing a string value for the keyCode. For example when data.keyCode is 13, data.keyName is "enter". You may also use wade.getKeyCode(keyName) and wade.getKeyName(keyCode) for static conversions. Keep in mind though that getKeyCode tmk does not toLower or toUpper for you, so make sure you are sending in an all-lowercase string.

I hope this extra ~1KB addition was worth it. You mightbe able to get away with cutting away some of the very rarely used keys to save a couple hundred bytes, but maybe this is just splitting hairs =).

oranjoose September 29th, 2016

To cover all the bases, I want to point out that the wade.isKeyDown function currently only takes a keyCode.

Would it follow your engine's style to overload the function to accept either a keyCode or a keyName? For example something like:

wade.isKeyDown = function (key) { return typeof key == "string" ? !!keysDown[wade.getKeyCode(key)] : !!keysDown[key] };

where the above code in bold would be what was added to the existing function.

Gio September 30th, 2016

Yes, very good point - I had forgotten about onKeyDown. From the next version of WADE it will accept a string as well as a numerical key code.