Holding Arrow Keys Down For Character Movement C# .Net ISSUES

Question

So in short i\'m simply trying to move a rectangle around a Canvas object in a WPF application. What i have here is my KeyDown event function. The problem is, when i hold a

Answer 1

I don't know enough about WPF to tell you what is going on, though you may be correct about the push button/pause thing. It depends on how WPF treats keypresses. My guess would be that it does so the same way most Microsoft forms work; it has a pause to keep you from typing multiple characters at a time. There may be a way around this but I'm not sure.

What I will say though is that you should use something designed for games. When I first tried creating games I did so in a style similar to what you are doing and it doesn't work. What you are using is designed for office software and will not give you access to what you need; at least not without fighting and workarounds. As was suggested by Alex Beisley look into XNA. It's a dead language unfortunately but it died fairly recently. It uses c#, was made by Microsoft, and is powerful enough to do what you want without fighting you and easy enough to use once you get the hang of it. It's a shame to see it killed off.

If you want to torture yourself then I'd suggest going the route I've been trying which is to learn C++ and DirectX. It is not easy and you will need to be patient and go through multiple tutorials (no one tutorial seems to do a good job explaining anything). DirectX and C++ are not going anywhere soon, so they are a safe bet if you are looking to get into a long term language.

Answer 2

I assume that you want your character to move on the initial KeyDown event. Then you want to ignore any subsequent KeyDown events until you get a KeyUp event.

So you can ignore the subsequent KeyDown events by checking e.IsRepeat e.g.

public void Window_KeyDown(object sender, KeyEventArgs e)
{
    if (e.IsRepeat) return;

    // rest of your code...

BTW, the non-smooth movement that you observe when scrolling an application is caused by the keyboard repeat delay. You can set this in the keyboard properties or though http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.systemparameters.keyboarddelay.aspx