Gamemaker Key Press Duration

Question

I am looking for a way to track the duration of a key press in gamemaker. I was looking into alarm functions, but I figured there's a more elegant way. How can I track the duration of a keypress?

Answer 1

You could simply have a variable that you will increment each step if the key is currently down, and read its value once the key is released.

Create event:

keyTimer = 0;

Step event:

if (keyboard_check(ord('A'))) {
    keyTimer += 1;
}

Key A Released event:

timePressed = keyTimer;
keyTimer = 0;

In this example, I am reading the time the user has pressed the A key and putting the value in the timePressed variable.