Handling the player’s input
Lots of different things depend on the movement of the player. These include:
- When to show the axe
- When to begin animating the log
- When to move all the branches down
Therefore, it makes sense to set up keyboard handling for the player chopping. Once this is done, we can put all the features we just mentioned into the same part of the code.
Let’s think for a moment about how we detect keyboard presses. In each frame, we test whether a particular keyboard key is currently held down.
If it is, we take action. If the Escape key is held down, we quit the game, and if the Enter key is held down, we restart the game. So far, this has been sufficient for our needs.
However, there is a problem with this approach when we try and handle the chopping of the tree. The problem has always been there; it just didn’t matter until now. Depending on how powerful your PC is, the game loop could be executed thousands...
