README.md

Roact Gamepad Example

This is an example of using gamepads in Roact. Right now, this example is incredibly convoluted, and waiting for a new Roact feature called First-class refs, which should ship later this year.

First-class refs enable the use of refs to lazily bind object references, which is useful for interfacing with Roblox's gamepad API.

In the meantime, a gamepad-specific workaround is implemented in this example called redirectToRef, which constructs a temporary Frame with an event to redirect to the real target when it's selected.

It does not have correct collection semantics in this codebase, but demonstrates a pattern that will work well in the future.

Once we have first-class refs, selection management in Roact will look like this:

local function TwoHalves()
	local leftRef = Roact.createRef()
	local rightRef = Roact.createRef()

	return Roact.createElement("Frame", nil, {
		Left = Roact.createElement("TextButton", {
			Text = "Left",
			SelectionRight = rightRef,
		}),

		Right = Roact.createElement("TextButton", {
			Text = "Right",
			SelectionLeft = leftRef,
		}),
	})
end

The SelectionLeft and SelectionRight properties of each value will be lazily populated when the other control is constructed!

For more complicated selection trees, libraries and patterns like createRefCache() and createSelectionItem will probably still be relevant, but should be much simpler to build.