Adobe Director Basics

ADOBE DIRECTOR BASICS
3D: Controlling action
Characters, key and keyCode
On Macintosh, the value of _key.keyCode depends on the actual physical key that the user presses. On an English
keyboard, the key beside Caps Lock is an A; on French keyboard it is a Q. In both cases, the value of _key.keyCode
produced by pressing this key will be 0.
This means that, on Macintosh, you can use _key.keyCode to indicate exactly which physical key the user pressed.
On Windows, the value of _key.keyCode depends on the character that is generated when the key is pressed. Pressing
A on an English keyboard or A on a French keyboard will lead to the same value of _key.keyCode, even though
different physical keys are pressed.
Pressing the key beside the Cap Locks key produces Q in French, and a _key.keyCode of 12
Issues with keyPressed() on Macintosh
In Director 11.5, on Macintosh, the values of _key.key and _key.keyCode immediately after a #keyDown event
represent the character that was typed and the key that was pressed respectively. However, keyPressed(aChar)
assumes that the user is typing on a standard US keyboard. Here is a simple Movie Script handler that you can use to
check this:
on keyDown()
if not _key.keyPressed(_key.key) then
put "KeyPressed("&QUOTE&_key.key&QUOTE&") error"
end if
if not _key.keyPressed(_key.keyCode) then
put "KeyPressed("&_key.keyCode&") error"
end if
end keyDown
Set the input keyboard layout for your computer to something other than a standard US English keyboard, launch your
movie and press each key in turn. Watch the output in the Message window.
If you chose a French keyboard, for example, where the same Roman letters have a different layout, you will find that
the keyPressed() function fails when it's used on characters that are not in the same place as on a US keyboard.
Last updated 8/26/2011
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