Game Timing / Input Management

Hello,

I would like to know if there is a good game timing and input management library that I could download for free or buy for Blitz3D. Generic event management would also be cool.

It has been a very very long time that I haven't been programming in Blitz3D anymore. I am therefore not up-to-date anymore with the latest and/or established best practices.

I have at the moment Blitz3D and the SpriteCandy package (I wish the latter one would have existed back in the early days of Blitz3D!!!).

Please don't reply with "you could easily do it yourself... delta time... blabla". I am not a good programmer but I do have some basic Blitz3D experience. For those of you that have the CD version of Blitz3D - the open-dna demos were written by me a long time ago.

What I am looking for is a robust, tested and lag free implementation of reading and queuing user input and managing time. I believe that a guy called swift (or something like that) developed an event management framework.

Your help in finding the best solution would be greatly appreciated. It's very difficult to dwelve through the forums and try to separate the "HI GUYS HERE IS A COOL LIBRARY" from the stuff that really works and is widely used.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Kind regards
Reda Borchardt

Naw there isn't any from what I know.

1. Blitz3D has no events so no event management at all. Blitz3D is fully polled

2. The only thing near to that, that I've ever seen was a small system that allowed "free input mapping" through the user.


The user you mean is sswift and should be easy to find even thought more likely on the BM boards today but his "software systems" are all linked in his worklogs.

I don't mind discussing delta timing and polled events. Then again, it has been discussed before. So maybe best stop slumber and hit the search key.

Look how trivial delta is:
http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=69659#779562
Not worth to make a big deal out of a framework IMHO.

dreamora: You are right concerning the polling business. This is however why I am looking for this event management thingy. There was something a long time ago that worked really well. I just can't find it anymore.

jfk: Thanks for the link.

I am looking for something that calculates at least an average over several frames instead of just the very last frame.

The code snippet and forums contain a few of the things that I am looking for already. I only want to make sure that I take whatever is considered to be the best in class at the moment and is ideally widely used.

Rob Hutchinson has for instance written an excellent include to manage keyboard scancodes that can be found in the code library under "input". I just don't know if it's still an up-to-date method of doing this or whether there already is a much cooler library.

I think that you have to check the forums on a daily basis to get a feel for this. Since I haven't been on here seriously looking for stuff in a while, I just don't know.

Rgds,
Reda

what is considered to be the best depends a lot on who's telling you that. It may also depend on the kind of game. Don't know of any input userlib. There are some libs to handle certain things, like catching the Close Button, or utilizing dragndrop from explorer, but no generic input lib. Well, I never searched something like that. Probably you'll find it in the userlibs forum section, if there's such a thing at all.

But hey, if it works then who cares about how old it is?

Reda - you can introduce tweening in your code (an alternative to delta time) with a simple cut-and-paste job from B3D's castle/mario demo. I consider it far superior to delta timing, after having tried both. Others will no-doubt disagree.

There are some seriously good games that have been made using Blitz in the last years! Aside from that, it looks as if not much has changed in Blitz3D land.

I thought that I would come back in here and find a link to an amazing Encyclopedia with all the collective wisdom of the community in a structured format (wishful thinking).

But maybe there is and I just haven't found it. I can't believe that we are still at a stage were everybody shares lots of good stuff on the forum and code archive and everybody else manages their own little treasure chest on a local computer.

Are we all too busy coding?

Regards
Reda

Well, as you know, there are Code Archives and searchable forums. Not sure what you're expecting to happen that is 'new' with B3D as it's getting on a bit.
Anyway, I searched for 'Event Management System' in the B3D forums which produced a small number of results one of which contained a link to Swift Event System .

You are clearly more skilled than I am in using the search functionality. Thanks!!

OMG! This is quality stuff from 2003. I always found this to be one of the best code contributions ever!