New Input System — Retrospective Recap

Objective: Recap what has been learnt after upgrading a project from the Old Input System to the New Input System.

What a fun project this was! Taking an existing Unity project and upgrading it from the Old Input System to the New Input System.

There is definitely some benefits to using the New Input System, especially if you plan on building your project across multiple platforms. While the leg work is more considerable in the early stages getting the Action Maps, Actions and Bindings all setup, it will benefit the team in the long run when they adapt the game to a different platform as the groundwork has been laid to simply add new Bindings to an Action.

There is also a learning curve to the New Input System, it is not so straightforward. But I think given enough time and practice, this will become irrelevant and you will thank yourself when companies are either looking to upgrade their existing projects or create a new one, as you will be the first in line with the most experience! Just stick with it…

Some of the features updated include:

• Breaking the Player, Drone and Forklift Actions into their own respective Action Maps and Actions, making use of the same keyboard controls W, A, S, D, R, F and Q but providing different functionality depending on which Action Map is active.​
• All the Interactable events now use a single interact button ‘E’ with interactions — ‘Tap’ and ‘Hold’. Instead of having to build logic in every script when I wanted to create an interactable event button — Input.GetKeyDown or Input.GetKey, I can now simply add an Action to an Action Map and assign the interact button to it.
• The Destructible crate event previously only had logic to destroy one piece of the crate. Now that we are utilising events with ‘Tap’ and ‘Hold’ interactions, I was able to create additional logic to allow multiple pieces to break off if the player ‘Held’ down the interact button.
• Project now supports Keyboard and Xbox Controller. You can simply pick up the Xbox Controller and start playing without having to have an Options menu to change the input selection.

I think it is time that I revisited some of my other projects and upgrade them also, hoping to learn and improve each time I do it!