Monogame For Experienced Programmers Part 3: Controls and Button Mapping

[@hiimpaco9743]

Great Tutorial !! Very understandable flow. KEEP IT UP

[@SharpTiger14]

Hey man keep up with these tutorials! Very helpful stuff!

[@SheepHunterPwn]

Great series! Since the development of these series takes some time, is there any chance you might put out a git repository containing good to know aspects of Monogame development? Looking forward to the next episode!

[@GreenOrangeStudios]

Thank you! Very helpful

[@scriptbrix]

It's been 3 months, will there ever be 4th next part of this series?

[@brentstechtutorials1528]

Yes. I'm not sure when I'll have the time but I plan for 1 or 2 more videos in this series.

[@S_Tadz]

There was a 3 years span between tutorial #2 and #3, so I wouldn't wait on this guy for you to open the documentation, or you may have to wait a while before having something playable! Good stuff, tho, very appreciated!

[@brentstechtutorials1528]

Just a note on reversing the Y on the arrow keys/DPad: I just realized the reason I wrote down that this was important is because vertical movement with the thumbstick is reversed. The way I coded this in the video is indeed correct. Second note: No, HashSets are not applicable to what I'm doing with the key/button mapping. Feel free to make any other suggestions for improvement though.

[@Quahu]

Couple of things I'd like to point out: - I think it makes little sense to check both keyboard and controller input at the same time for the same operations, if the user has pressed a button on the keyboard we don't need to check the for the same thing on the controller. - I believe you might've done the inverted vertical movement just because this is the way it's done in some other game engines (Unity)? It's not good that you didn't know *why* you inverted it, the viewer might do it the way you did it and then you both end up with code that you don't know the reasoning for lol - You're copying all those strings over and over every frame just to store input information. Using flags (i.e. integer bits) would be infinitely more efficient and not error prone, but even if you were to do it the string way, there's no reason not to use a HashSet for this. - The way you use the elapsed game time is incorrect, you're using TimeSpan#Milliseconds instead of TimeSpan#TotalMilliseconds. The former is just the milliseconds part of the TimeSpan where as the latter is the actual *total* time elapsed represented in milliseconds. I don't mean to sound rude about this - I think the title saying "For Experienced Programmers" isn't accurate. You're essentially writing simple if statements and explaining them in-depth for the major part of the video, which I'd imagine everyone familiar with C# or programming in general could follow on their own. Besides the actual movement math the rest is all `if` statements checking for user input, for which the video feels way too lengthy. I think you should rebrand the series to "For Beginners", it might attract more people and I believe the content in its current form is very much suited for that audience.

[@brentstechtutorials1528]

I see... I haven't heard of a HashSet before, I'll look into it. This is for "experienced programmers" as in I won't explain the very basics of like what a string is for example. Someone who is new to programming in general could probably follow along but they'd be ultimately lost. Also this is a tad embarrassing but I can't recall why I used ElapsedGameTime.Milliseconds as it has been 4 years since I made the last part of this series. All this code is something I developed myself and all works perfectly fine in games I've made but I do acknowledge it could be improved. So I'll look into the things you've mentioned and make improvements for next time.