Virtual Realm

GamePad State and Button Pressed

Saturday, March 03 2007 - gse, xna, tutorial

With one of the systems that I am currently working on I need to be able to tell wether the button has been pressed then released, to do this I have employed the process of having a previous game pad state stored inside my application. Now I know that this is common practice but in doing so I thought I would expand on the default game template that ships with the Game Studio Express and add the functions.

To start open up the Game Studio Express IDE and create a default Windows Game (Or a 360 game as the process will work with either). Next add the following line just underneath the declaration of the content manager.

GamePadState previousGamePadState;

It should now look like this.

GraphicsDeviceManager graphics;

ContentManager content;

GamePadState previousGamePadState;

The next step is to moderfy the Update Call in the Application, browse down to the Update call and change the following lines...

// Allows the default game to exit on Xbox 360 and Windows

if (GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One).Buttons.Back == ButtonState.Pressed)

this.Exit();

So that they look like the following...

GamePadState currentState = GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One);

if (currentState.IsConnected)

{

// Allows the default game to exit on Xbox 360 and Windows

if (currentState.Buttons.Back == ButtonState.Pressed &&

previousGamePadState.Buttons.Back == ButtonState.Released)

{

this.Exit();

}

previousGamePadState = currentState;

}

With the above changes you should now be able to allow the user to hold down a button and the action will only happen once the user releases the button.

I hope that this has help some one, one thing that you might also be able to do now is export this out as a template and use it for future applications as your base. If anyone is interested I could write about the process to do this...