Thread: How do I make it so the program carries on if there is no user input?

I am having one or two slight problems with my tetris game, but as they say, the thrill of the kill is in the chase. Anyway, the problem is that the way I have programmed it so far is that in order for the shape to drop down one place, the user has to move it. In other words, the shape will not drop down by one space after a specified time, but the user must move the piece to the side in order for it then to drop down.

The problem is that the program waits for the user input before it continues with the game loop. How exactly can I make it so that if there is no user input when it reaches that part of the code just to move on, and carry on as normal? I have a feeling that it may involve multithreading, which doesn't fill me with joy.

Code:

while(RUNNING)
{
// Take user movement input
controls();                        <------------------------------ It stays here until there is user input, but I want it so it carries on if there isn't any user input
// Translate shape down by one
translate();
}

This has nothing to do with multi-threading. You need a keyboard function that 'polls' the keyboard instead of waiting for it. In most systems the keyboard is polled every frame and then if any keys were pressed they are dealt with during Update().

DirectInput does this when you retrieve the keyboard state. It fills up an array that represents each key. Then you use pre-defined constants as indices into the array to see if the key was up or down. If the array element is 1 the key is down, if it is 0 the key is up.

Window programs accomplish this by processing WM_KEYDOWN and other keyboard related messages (like WM_CHAR, WM_KEYUP, etc) in their message loops. Windows will send these messages to the window that has the focus and then it is the window's job to respond to the messages.

I can think of very few times that you would want to actually halt everything and just 'wait' for a keypress. Most of the time keyboard functions are polling functions. Even buffered functions will somehow notify you there is something in the buffer. Waiting on the keyboard is a huge waste of cycles.

Mind telling us what library are you using?

AFAIK there is no way to achieve this using only standard C++.