sending keystrokes to flash?

**Nitrov8** · 10-03-2005, 07:38 AM

I'm trying to make a freindly interface for remotes and I have some good ideas using flash but the biggest trouble I have come across is getting RR to send the keystrokes to flash.

I did a simple test setup:
Made a flash movie 800x600 so it covers the whole RR window.
Made a circle with 4 buttons on it that rotates when a key is pressed.
The top button is activated when another button is pressed.
I have listerners setup in flash to listen for these keystrokes.

This works great apart from one thing when you start RR or move from another screen it seems the flash movies doesn't have the focus, if you click on the screen with the mouse first it works.

I have tried many was to give flash the focus without having to click on the screen but had no success any ideas?

Is there a label I can put it that will pass dynamic keystrokes?

**DiNASTY** · 10-03-2005, 10:32 AM

Good Question!! I ran into the same problem... I turns out that the flash on the CURRENT screen is the only one that will receive dynamic info.

If you only need a few keystrokes to control your (4 button) menu, I would try setting some hotkeys in the KeyTBL.INI like (UP, DOWN, L, R) and have them set a corresponding custom label "SETLABEL;CUSTOMLABEL;DOWN" Now that you have the keystrokes controlling labels it should be easy for you to poll their status from flash and control your menu.

**guino** · 10-03-2005, 11:41 AM

DiNASTY's idea is really the best one. RR wont allow the focus on flash on purpose because it hogs the keyboard when navigating through the objects, making it a mess for users with a keyboard as the only input device.

**Nitrov8** · 10-03-2005, 12:33 PM

That is a good idea DiNASTY and it did work but in my testing of this method I ran into too many problems for it to work well enough for a menu.

First one was the label stays constant until it is updated with another command so my menu would stay in a constant loop

I tried to overcome this by sending a fscommand back to the label to change it but the lag between the two is too much and my menu would advance 3 buttons before it stopped.

Something else I noticed is that you needed to start the label with CUSTOM for the label to retain the info it was sent. If you called it something like FLASHLABEL the info would still apear but would dissapear just as quick, still not long enough for flash to pick it up though.

I just had another idea maybe I can find a program to do a mouse click on the corner of the screen for me evertime I start RR and everytime I change screens, hmmmmm.

**guino** · 10-03-2005, 01:51 PM

What CDR did with the games was convert the SWF into an EXE and then he embbeded it onto the skin.

**lostreception** · 04-06-2006, 10:58 PM

guino was this issue ever worked around

im using the sdk and im wondering if a simple getfocus for flash
followed by a while in focus send this key
then break the loop after the key is sent would work

**guino** · 04-07-2006, 12:26 AM

The problem is that the flash object will not release focus back to RR, which renders the keyboard useless (as RR won't receive keypresses, because the flash object will catch everything).. There's no easy way around it.