How to Control Rapid Keyboard Input for Smooth Game Movement in Pygame?

How to Control Keyboard Input in Pygame

When developing games using Pygame, it's crucial to handle keyboard input effectively. This article explores the issue of overly rapid ship movement in a simple Pygame game due to continuous key pressing and provides solutions to restrict movement to specific frames or key presses.

Pygame offers two primary methods for obtaining keyboard input: pygame.key.get_pressed() and event handling. get_pressed() returns a Boolean array indicating which keys are currently pressed down, but it doesn't specify when a key was initially pressed.

In the provided code, the ship's position is updated based on get_pressed() values, causing continuous movement as long as the key is held down. To restrict this, event handling can be employed to respond only to key press events (KEYDOWN):

events = pygame.event.get()
for event in events:
    if event.type == pygame.KEYDOWN:
        if event.key == pygame.K_LEFT:
            location -= 1
        elif event.key == pygame.K_RIGHT:
            location += 1

However, for continuous movement within a key press, a limitation must be enforced:

move_ticker = 0  # Initialize a ticker for limiting movement

keys = pygame.key.get_pressed()
if keys[pygame.K_LEFT]:
    if move_ticker == 0:  # Check if movement is allowed
        move_ticker = 10  # Set ticker to 10 frames
        location -= 1
        if location == -1:
            location = 0
elif keys[pygame.K_RIGHT]:
    if move_ticker == 0:
        move_ticker = 10
        location += 1
        if location == 5:
            location = 4

# Update the ticker every frame
if move_ticker > 0:
    move_ticker -= 1

This implementation updates the ship's location once every 10 frames, ensuring a more controlled and responsive movement.

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