Coding the course’s start animation

In this video, we add the ability to skip the obstacle course’s overview animation.

New concepts

Handling individual input events

We already saw the Input object, which we used to calculate the player’s movement direction. We can also use it to know if the player is pressing or releasing a key in a given frame.

We call that polling. Typically, every frame, we check for the state of some input actions and react accordingly.

Godot has another powerful mechanism to process and consume input events as they occur.

You can define the _unhandled_input() function to receive each event individually.

This function receives every input in the form of an event argument:

• Every keypress or release.
• Every gamepad button press or release.
• Every move of the joystick.
• Every mouse motion.

Godot calls it once per node and input event.

You can test if an action is pressed by calling the is_action_pressed() function on the input event. This is similar to calling Input.is_action_just_pressed().

func _unhandled_input(event: InputEvent) -> void:
    if event.is_action_pressed("start_game"):
        start_game()

Why would I use this system over the Input object?

Unlike the Input object, the dedicated input functions can consume input events, preventing other nodes in the game from receiving them.

Imagine that you’re making a hack-and-slash game where the player moves by clicking.

When they open their inventory, the player also clicks to select and move items. You don’t want clicking in the inventory to cause the player to move.

You can consume clicks in the inventory using the input functions, preventing the player’s character from receiving them.

You do it by first calling get_tree() to get the SceneTree object and calling its set_input_as_handled() function.

func _unhandled_input(event: InputEvent) -> void:
    if event.is_action_pressed("click"):
        # Consume the input event, preventing other nodes from receiving it.
        get_tree().set_input_as_handled()

Another benefit is that you can turn these input functions on and off without turning off the _process() function, as we saw in the code.

# Turn off calls to the _unhandled_input() function on this node.
set_process_unhandled_input(false)

There is more depth to input handling in Godot, and these two systems have more reasons to coexist. But you’ll need some more experience creating games for all the extra features to make sense.