Input Handling

Gondwana reacts to input via polling, not via platform-events

Platform adapters feed raw device state into engine pollers, and the engine checks those pollers during its background task phase.

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Input systems

The engine exposes centralized access to:

• keyboard
• mouse
• gamepad
• touch

via EngineInputSystems.

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Engine cycle placement

Input is polled during DoBackgroundTasks, before rendering. That means input changes can affect movement, animation, or scene state before the next frame is drawn.

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Why polling fits Gondwana

Because the engine wants deterministic update flow:

• timer events
• input polling
• movement
• collisions
• camera updates
• rendering

Polling keeps those steps ordered and predictable.

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Platform boundary

The core engine does not want to know about WinForms, Avalonia, SDL2, or browser specifics. Those details stay in adapters. The engine only consumes normalized input state.

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Where to read next

• Gondwana/EngineInputSystems.cs
• Gondwana/Input/Keyboard/KeyboardEventPoller.cs
• Gondwana/Input/Mouse/MouseEventPoller.cs
• Gondwana/Input/Gamepad/GamepadEventPoller.cs
• Gondwana/Input/Touch/TouchEventPoller.cs