Smooth character movement with Arrow keys

[Kallyn]

Hey!

I tried making a simple character movement with the arrow keys, just with a rectangle moving around the screen. However, when I press the arrow keys, the rectangle moves similarly to how a text cursor moves between text when the arrow key is held: once for one character, then a pause, then quickly through the rest of the characters. That movement is mimicked by my rectangle, moving once and pausing, then continuing to move after that. I thought I could use a while loop to detect when a key is pressed, but I realized I couldn't because the rest of the program would pause while the key is pressed, so I need to make it with an if statement instead of a while loop. Is there a way to make the movement smooth?

I'm not sure how to display code properly so I am just going to do it like this.

    while (window.pollEvent(event))
        {
            if (event.type == sf::Event::Closed)
                window.close();

            if (sf::Keyboard::isKeyPressed(sf::Keyboard::Up)) {
                rectangle.move(0, -0.5);
                y -= 0.05;
                cout << x << ", " << y << endl;
            }
            if (sf::Keyboard::isKeyPressed(sf::Keyboard::Down)) {
                rectangle.move(0, 0.5);
                y += 0.05;
                cout << x << ", " << y << endl;
            }
            if (sf::Keyboard::isKeyPressed(sf::Keyboard::Left)) {
                rectangle.move(-0.5, 0);
                x -= 0.05;
                cout << x << ", " << y << endl;
            }
            if (sf::Keyboard::isKeyPressed(sf::Keyboard::Right)) {
                rectangle.move(0.5, 0);
                x += 0.05;
                cout << x << ", " << y << endl;
            }
        }

[kojack]

There are two ways of checking the keyboard: event based (reading KeyPressed, KeyReleased or TextEntered events) or immediate (sf::Keyboard::isKeyPressed).
The immediate check goes outside of the event loop, otherwise it only gets called when some event comes in. In this case, the pause then repeat is caused by the TextEntered event, which is doing the standard OS behavior.

Making your code like this should fix it:

while (window.pollEvent(event))
{
        if (event.type == sf::Event::Closed)
                window.close();
}

if (sf::Keyboard::isKeyPressed(sf::Keyboard::Up)) {
        rectangle.move(0, -0.5);
        y -= 0.05;
        cout << x << ", " << y << endl;
}
if (sf::Keyboard::isKeyPressed(sf::Keyboard::Down)) {
        rectangle.move(0, 0.5);
        y += 0.05;
        cout << x << ", " << y << endl;
}
if (sf::Keyboard::isKeyPressed(sf::Keyboard::Left)) {
        rectangle.move(-0.5, 0);
        x -= 0.05;
        cout << x << ", " << y << endl;
}
if (sf::Keyboard::isKeyPressed(sf::Keyboard::Right)) {
        rectangle.move(0.5, 0);
        x += 0.05;
        cout << x << ", " << y << endl;
}