Pressing the spacebar continuously activates the button

[mintymood]

Godot Version

4.2.1

Question

Hi! I’m a beginner and this is my first game ever. I’m having an issue with my pause menu/HUD.

• When I click on a TextureButton, I want my TextureRect to show up and pause the game. Clicking the button again should resume the game, creating a simple open/close menu.

• After a lot of trial and error, the menu works as intended. However, whenever I press the space button, it pauses/unpauses my game. I added a debug print to see when the button is clicked, and it seems the space bar is clicking the TextureButton repeatedly.

What I’ve tried so far, but didn’t work:

• Setting Inspector/Mode to none
• Checking Project Settings/Input map (space is set up as “jump” for the character)
  • The button and the TextureRect are in a CanvasLayer.

The issue activates after I press the menu button at least once, but not before. Additionally, I made the menu work by setting it to Inspector/Process/Mode: Always, as I was previously unable to repeatedly click the button after pausing.

I checked these posts before but couldn’t figure out the issue:

If I press a button then I use space it presses the button, how can i prevent that?

Attention Topic was automatically imported from the old Question2Answer platform. Asked By jujumumu I have a button and when I use my cursor to click on it to do the function. Then using space which I use as jump when I press space it presses the button since it is selected or something. I only want the mouse to be able to press it nothing else. How could I do that?

Button is being triggered by spacebar after clicked once.

Reply From: zdimaria You can do: button.release_focus() and then space bar will no longer click it. Thank you very much! NoIE | 2018-04-04 19:38 Now my button press animation doesn’t play. wetbadger | 2021-05-05 22:54

The code I’m using:

func _on_pause_button_pressed():
print(“Menu was pressed”)
pausePanel.visible = !pausePanel.visible
get_tree().paused = !get_tree().paused

Thank you in advance!

[mphe]

The pause button receives input focus when you first click it.
Afterwards if you press space, it will press the button, as it has focus.
This is useful if you intend to make your UI controllable with a keyboard.

To disable this behavior, you can:

• Go to project settings, enable the “show builtin actions” switch and remove the space button from ui_select. Note that this will completely disable pressing space to activate UI elements. You can also assign another key that is more suitable for you.
• Set focus_mode on the TextureButton node to None. This will prevent the button from receiving focus at all.

[mintymood]

Thank you so much for the detailed explanation; it works flawlessly now! l