Hold to activate?

Questions
#1

I’m trying to use a timer, etc. to require a button to be pressed by not released for X seconds and if released before that time it doesn’t fire it’s event.

I’m coming up short – anyone got any dead simple code/example of how to do it?

Time pressed button - Example
#2

This will print “Success!” if the player holds down some_button for 5 seconds:

function on_input(self, action_id, action)
    if action_id == hash("some_button") then
        if action.pressed then
            self.timer = timer.delay(5, false, function() print("Success!") end)
        elseif action.released then
            timer.cancel(self.timer)
        end
    end
end
2 Likes
#3

There are two main ways to do this @Potota posted the timer way, but you could also use delta time coming from the update function. (This second way is more if you need to have how long they’ve been holding down for some button animation or something, if you don’t need that going with the timer method is a lot simpler :wink: )

local elapsed = 0
local target_time = 2

function update(self, dt)
    if self.holding then
        elapsed = elapsed + dt
        if elapsed > target_time then
            self.holding = false
            elapsed = 0
            print("Held long enough!") 
        end
    end
end

function on_input(self, action_id, action)
    if action_id == hash("button_press") then
        if action.pressed then
             self.holding = true
        elseif action.released then
             self.holding = false
             elapsed = 0
        end
    end
end
2 Likes
#4

Third solution. Track time when button was pressed and released:

function on_input(self, action_id, action)
    if action_id == hash("some_button") then
        if action.pressed then
            self.pressed_time = socket.gettime()
        elseif action.released then
            if (socket.gettime() - self.pressed_time) > 5 then
            	print("Success!")
            end
        end
    end
end
4 Likes
#5

Thank you everyone! I used @Potota approach and it’s working nice. One thing I think happens is that if you hold the selection after and it’s part of a loop of actions (think like a conversation tree) and they release their input AFTER the timer has itself finished executing you can throw an error on the action.released element of canceling a timer that’s completed. So I added:

if self.timer ~=nil then timer.cancel(self.timer) end

So that it cancels only a timer that itself is still executing when the user releases. That has so far stopped the errors I was seeing, and not introduced anything newly problematic… yet. :slight_smile: