[GD-Windows] Input thread

[Pierre T. <p.t...@wa...>]

Hi,

Here's an old question of mine I never really solved (since it was for some
home project I never find enough time to work on :
www.codercorner.com/Oni.htm)

The question is about keyboard input management, on Windows. The trouble is
when you rely on multiple keys beeing pressed in a sequence, to do a combo
(like in a fighting game).

Currently I use GetAsyncKeyState() and do my own little analysis to detect
combos. It works well as long as framerate is ok, since I only query
keyboard values on-the-fly, each frame.

As soon as framerate drops, it happens that some combos are missed, and
overall controls appear a bit laggy & not responding wery well.

I read somewhere an old MSDN article from 1996 (that I can't seem to find
again) that advocated the use of a separate thread (actually a multimedia
timer, as in timeSetEvent) to read keyboard values at a fixed rate.

It sounds like a good idea indeed, but I never bothered implementing it,
since it also sounds a bit overkill. So before I give it a try, my 2
questions are :

- is this a standard thing to do ?
- is this still relevant nowadays, or is there a better alternative ? (in
particular, using multimedia timers might be an obsolete thing, superseded
by DirectInput maybe. But I'd like to avoid D.I. since otherwise I never
needed it in this particular project).


- Pierre