[Chrono]

Well me and a friend made a great walking engine for our game but we didn't manage to add diagonal movement like the zelda game.

If you could help that'd be great, heres the code.

[Rainer Deyke]

Do not use key repeat.

At regular intervals, check if the arrow keys are pressed. Move if they are.

Relevant functions: SDL_GetTicks and SDL_GetKeyState.

[Scrim]

Rainer is right, you are better off checking whether keys are down at regular intervals. There are a couple of advantages:

One, the rate of movement of your sprites isn't tied to the key repeat rate. You can have a separate game loop using its own timing logic to keep all your sprites moving consistently. This is especially important if you want NPCs to move around while the player is standing still, for example. Also, I have no idea if the key repeat rate is something you can count on to be exactly the same on all OS's / hardware (though I assume SDL_EnableKeyRepeat takes that into account).

For another, diagonal movement is handled fairly easily: when you check for input and determine that a pair of keys are down simultaneously (up and right, say), you can perform a diagonal move. This is a bit harder to do if you are detecting individual key presses (or repeats) in series.

Another option is to only catch key_pressed and key_released events (or whatever the equivalent terminology is in SDL): when you detect that a key has been pressed, you put your sprite in the appropriate a "moving" state and update its position every frame. Once the key is released, movement in that direction stops. This is basically equivalent to Rainer's suggestion in that you would have a game loop with its own timing driving the rate of sprite movement. It's a bit more complex though, since you have to keep track of the state of the arrow keys so you can tell when a pair of them are down at once.