Slick Forums

Hey,

I'm trying to get a title screen working that can be controlled with either the keyboard or mouse. So far I have buttons for "Start Game," "Settings," and "Exit" with rollovers and callbacks all working nicely. I'd like to be able to use the arrow keys to control the buttons as well, i.e., up/down selects the button and enter activates it. The best I can figure out is to capture arrow key movement and manually do rootPane.focusNextChild()/focusPreviousChild(). Then in the mouse hover for every button, shift keyboard focus to it. It seems like there should be a more elegant solution than that, but I can't figure anything better out. I'm also baffled by how I'm supposed to be using these input map/action map classes, too. I read through the tutorials and poked around in the demo, but still don't understand them. The answer to my question might lie simply in there somewhere, but any help on understanding this library is appreciated. From what I've seen so far it can do everything I need it to and more...just as soon as I figure out how. :]

Thanks,
Jarett

You can setup an inputMap for your title screen with up/down arrow as "next" / "prev" action. Then you can register actions for these:
And I would leave the hover and the focus separated from each other, but if you want to combine them you can use a ButtonModel callback to detect a hover change and transfer the focus when a button gains focus.

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TWL - The Themable Widget Library

Hey MatthiasM,

Thanks, that worked pretty well, except that focusNextChild and focusPrevChild don't seem to work like I expected. Next works perfectly, but when I hit up, it toggles between the item and the item above it. It almost seems like it wants to reorder the focus order, and "previous" becomes whichever one it focused last. Is there some way I can manually set the focus order, maybe?

Thanks,
Jarett

Are you using DesktopArea as parent? This widget reorders it's children based on keyboard focus (this is designed to be used with ResizableFrame as children).

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TWL - The Themable Widget Library

I'm using the TWLSlick package and adding them directly to the rootPane. I see that the RootPane class extends DesktopArea, so that must be the problem. Should I stick a ResizableFrame between the root pane and my buttons? I don't plan on using the functionality of ResizablePane, so would just a generic Widget object be a better choice?

Thanks for the help!
Jarett

Never mind, I think I got it: I used a BoxLayout, which actually simplified the rest of the code a little bit. Thanks for the help!