Heya guys, i have a titlescreen in my game where i want to be able to scroll through the menu selection. (New Game, Options, Exit Game) without having to repeately press the up/down keyboard keys to scroll through the different menu selections. The problem im having, is that it is scrolling through the options way too fast, & i'm not sure how to add in a timer to the up/down input so that it scrolls through (New Game, Options, and Exit Game) at a reasonable pace. like say waiting 2/10th's of a second before scrolling through the next menu option. How would i go about doing this?

This stuff is a lot easier to do if you wrap the input functions in a higher level class. Then you can check for NewPress() or BeingHeld() etc... Store a timer value, and have a function only return true if a certain amount of time has passed, than reset the timer value. Then you can hold the stick in a direction, and only have the cursor move at a comfortable rate.

EDIT: Haha, simul-posted. My post is just a long-winded elaboration of Daaark's post.

Basically, you're going to need a timer variable for every key/button that you'll want to allow for this time delay. What I've done is created an InputState struct that looks like this:

struct InputState
{
   public bool Previous; // True if button was pressed last frame
   public bool Current;  // True if button is pressed this frame
   public bool Pressed; // True for each frame of delayed input
   public int Timer;     // Number of milliseconds before next delayed input
}

Then, I created an Input class that has an InputState for every key/button. I also declare two constant values, REPEAT_DELAY and REPEAT_INTERVAL. REPEAT_DELAY is the number of milliseconds between the initial button press and the first repeat, and REPEAT_INTERVAL is the number of milliseconds between each repeated input. On each Update call to the game, I update every InputState in the Input class like this:

inputState[button].Previous = inputState[button].Current;
inputState[button].Current = gamePadState.IsButtonDown(button);

if (inputState[button].Current)
{
   if (inputState[button].Previous)
   {
      inputState[button].Timer -= (int)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds;
      
      if (inputState[button].Timer < 0)
      {
         inputState[button].Pressed = true;
         inputState[button].Timer += REPEAT_INTERVAL;
      }
      else
      {
         inputState[button].Pressed = false;
      }
   }
   else
   {
      inputState[button].Pressed = true;
      inputState[button].Timer = REPEAT_DELAY;
   }
}
else
{
   inputState[button].Pressed = false;
   inputState[button].Timer = 0;
}

Now, just check inputState[button].Pressed if you want to detect delayed repeated input, or simply check inputState[button].Current if you want to see if the button is being held down. Hopefully, this will give you a rough idea of how I go about solving this problem.

thanx a bunch. i got it working perfectly