Best way to properly handle a cursor using keyboard input?

Hello folks,

So, imagine a menu of *any* game. Take as a reference the attachment to this post.
We can see there is a cursor on the left of the Attack text, if the player wants to select any command, he would press right/left and expect the cursor to move depending on the input.

The problem is, how would you move the cursor around and place it in a "precise" position of the left of the text? This is a fairly simple example, as we could just hardcode the position or something like that. But what if we have N rows and M columns? How would you reliably handle the cursor movement regardless of the number of choices you have on the menu?

Thanks in advance.

 

You could have an array of transforms, or rect transforms if this is a canvas, and have an index for whatever the current arrow is set to, and basically just set the position based on whatever that index is. So for example,

Code (CSharp):

1. void MoveCursor(int num){
2. currentMenuIndex += num;
3. cursor.transform.position = menuObjs[currentMenuIndex] + offset;
4.  
5. }

So then, depending on which key you press, you can pass in 1 or -1. You would, of course, have to add in some checks for if the "currentMenuIndex" gets too high or goes below 0.

You could even take out the "offset" and just simply have a bunch of empty game objects to mark which point the cursor should be at. And then in your select method, or enter, you could pass in the current menu index.

That's one way to handle this, there's a million others, I'm sure.

 

This was my first thought, and it's basically hardcoding. Which would bring problems if you try to run the game on different resolutions.

 

Give it an anchor that covers the words, set the anchor to reposition with screen size, put the text under the same anchor. If they're all on your canvas, it should be fine.