Thread: Length of keypress question

Awesome board you've got here. Everyone is incredibly helpful and informative. Thanks in advance for any help with my problem.

I've Google'd this (is how I ended up here) and read your FAQ and done a search on this board and have found some interesting possibilities, but didn't find a definitive answer.

I'm using Dev-cpp and WinXP.

I'd like to be able to tell when the user has held down the key for double or triple the time of a normal keypress. For instance, tapping 'T' causes the gun to fire single shots, but holding 'T' down will cause a more powerful shot to occur after 1 second or half a second of holding down 'T'.

Some possibilities I've found from this board so far include kbhit(), GetAsyncKeyState, ::QueryPerformanceCounter(), ::QueryPerformanceFrequency(), and difftime.

I plan on researching more about those now, but wanted to see if I'm on the right track or if perhaps anyone can direct me down a better path.

Thanks again.

This is posted in c++ but I can give you a sugestion that will work on windows since that is what you said you were using.
Handle WM_KEYDOWN and call GetTickCount() when you receive WM_KEYUP call GetTickCount() again and compare to the previous time to calculate how long the key was held down.

Thanks for the reply, Quantum1024.

Since this may eventually be ported to windows, that'll quite helpful, but for now, it's a simple C++ program.

I'll repost this on that section of the boards again since it's been moved.

Originally Posted by ElastoManiac

I have a question too:

When using WM_KEYDOWN, how can you know if thats the first time
user has pressed key. You know, i only want to recive message once, and thats
when the key is pressed.
lParam has something to do with it, but i don't know exactly what...
If you know the anwser please post an example.

Bit 30 contains the previous key state so you could do this

Code:

if (HIWORD(lParam)&1)