Unity Create Your Own Keybindings Manager

October 5, 2020

Unity

Input Systems

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Title: How to Create a Custom Keybinding Handler for your Unity Game - *Improved*
By: Dapper Dino
Youtube - Tutorial
Description: Tutorial for creating your own basic input manager within Unity.

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Overview

The idea behind creating an input manager is to have a flexible and easily accessible tool for both setting up your input system within a game as well as modifying it. This manager should help keep programming associated with the player input more organized and consistent, as well as providing pathways to allowing both the designer and eventually the players options to easily change the inputs to their liking.

Tutorial Notes

Setup

Immediately they create an InputManager class that follows a singleton pattern, but also includes a DontDestroyOnLoad method. This is ok to start, but may be worth looking into editing that if using a more sophisticated multi-scene project setup later on.

Within the InputManager, they created classes to replace some of Unity's basic input reading methods. These included: GetKey, GetKeyDown, and GetKeyUp.

They then added another class named KeybindingActions, which was a container for a public enum that held references to all the possible actions you may want for the game. For now I decided to just include this enum directly in the InputManager class, but will see if it makes sense to separate later.

Next they add the scriptable object core of this setup, which is named Keybindings. The benefit of using a scriptable object here is that it makes it easy to swap it out with different sets of keybindings (especially with different types of input or controllers).

Building Out InputManager and Keybindings Scriptable Object

Within this scriptable object, they created another class named KeybindingCheck. This provides the connection to setup which keys are tied to which actions. They mention a dictionary could be used here, but they created a list of this serializable class instead so it can easily be seen and modified within the Inspector. This class simply holds data for a KeyBindingActions object and a KeyCode object (to ensure they are connected). The scriptable object then just has a list of these KeyBindingChecks.

They mention if you want the player to be able to set their own keybindings you technically just need to edit the scriptable object and this will modify the keybindings. However, scriptable object changes only remain if they are done in the inspector, so you would also need to save that data somewhere else if you had a game where you want the player to be able to set their keybindings once and have the same setup each time they close and reopen the game, which would be the standard implementation.

With that setup, they go back to fill out the methods within the InputManager which effectively replace those provided by Unity. Each of them follow the same pattern seen here in the GetKeyDown replacement method:

public bool GetKeyDown(KeyBindingActions key)
{
foreach (KeyBindings.KeyBindingCheck keyBindingCheck in keybindings.keyBindingChecks)
{
if (keyBindingCheck.keyBindingAction == key)
return Input.GetKeyDown(keyBindingCheck.keyCode);
}

return false;
}

So effectively whenever you would use GetKeyDown for example, you use this InputManager.GetKeyDown method and pass in one of the enum options you have provided as a parameter (i.e. Jump, Crouch) and it searches through the list of KeyBindingCheck objects you have in the KeyBindings scriptable object and if it finds that enum in that list, it returns the Unity base input method (i.e. GetKeyDown here) with the corresponding keyCode you have associated with that enum as its input parameter.

Summary

I like that this method allows for the use of easily accessible and modifiable enums that are specifically chosen for your game when it comes to programming the input of your game, but I am concerned how efficient this is since it appears to add small extra checks with every single input from this user. While small, this is an extremely common action that will be used thousands and thousands of times easily in normal gameplay so I wonder if it ends up being worth the cost. This method does also allow you to edit the keybindings at runtime and because it is with a scriptable object, the changes are actually saved even when exiting play mode.