Make _input function be called on hold (or every) input

[Bruszan]

I love Godot and how intuitive everything is, but in my experience, handling input hasn't been that way basically because the _input function is only called when there is a different input compared to its last call, meaning that held buttons, clicks and analogs won't be calling it on the next subsequent frames.

And for me that's caused a lot of unnecessary confusion, for example, I wanted my character to do an action every frame/tick while a button is held. Thankfully, the _input function can make it efficient by tracking the action only when there is input, but the issue is that if the input is the same as the last call, it won't be tracked, making functions like _is_action_pressed() on _input pointless.

So even if most of the time this specific input won't be pressed, the only way currently is to track if the button is being held every frame/tick on _process, making it very inefficient

My first suggestion would be simply to make the _input methods be called every time there is input, even if it's the same as the last call, but considering that's probably intentional, I would suggest to make a new input method which works that way, because I know people will like to use it for situations which something must be called every frame/tick while holding a button without tracking the input every frame/tick.

[Calinou]

_physics_process() is where you should be checking input for gameplay purposes. It's called a fixed number of times per second, so no worries about performance issues at high framerates.

Changing the behavior of _input() would break compatibility with existing projects and also decrease performance.

[Bruszan]

I can see that, but I'm worried about the amount of inputs being tracked every frame when it could be tracked only when there is input. And even if that wouldn't make much difference, I believe it would be very much intuitive just like the rest of the engine's design but also the code would be better structured when having all the input related code being handled on _input.
And even if there is still need of separating the input code, I think my suggestion of having a new function that can receive any input, even the held ones, would be preferable so that we can use it instead of separating it with all the other game logic being on _physics_process. Thanks for the quick answer!