Flash Keyboard Input in Full Screen Work Around

I have recently cut some beef with Adobe and their decision to not allow the Flash player to capture keyboard input. In my game, Daphne, I see this decision as a show stopper… Imagine playing Starcraft and not being able to use hot keys in the heat of battle, lame. Hot keys are key to any self respecting RTS game developer.

Thought it is possible for players to play Daphne in a regular browser window surrounded by HTML, it loses a lot of appeal, especially as your mouse must always be over the Flash canvas in order to register certain fundamentally important (and basic) game features, such as the ability to scroll the game map when your mouse is at the edge of the canvas. It is too easy to move your mouse beyond the Flash canvas, especially when your base is being over run and you are frantically scrolling the map to look for defense or an exit. This significantly deteriorates game play.

And besides that, who wouldn’t want to play games in full screen vs a small canvas in a browser?

A limited solution is to have your Flash canvas take up 100% of the width and height of the browser page and rely on the browsers build in full screen functionality (usually activated by the F11 key). This is limited because different browsers have different notions of ‘full screen’. Firefox for example expands to full screen, but the address bar is still visible on top (though there are plug-ins that remedy this). Opera mean while implements true full screen right out of the box.

This is a limited solution for these reasons, and because the end user may need to install a new browser to play Daphne in full screen. The whole idea of using Flash as my development platform is so Daphne can be played in any environment and behave the same with no additional downloads or without troubling the end user to have to manually install 3rd party products.

Nevertheless, this proves my point that Adobe is out to lunch when it comes to the thought process behind their idea that keyboard input whilst in full screen is a security liability. It can be done by circumventing Flash and javascript entirely and just relying on the browser.