What causes inputs dropped when pressed during a movement lockout?

You read input only when the player is free to act, so a press made during an attack, landing recovery, or other lockout is never recorded and is silently lost.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix an Input Buffer Eating Presses During an Attack or Movement Lockout

Quick answer: Always record presses into a timestamped buffer regardless of state, then consume the buffered action the moment the lockout ends if it is still within the buffer window.

Pressing jump a hair early during a locked action should still fire when control returns, not vanish. Buffer the input unconditionally. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Record input every frame

Capture the rising edge of each action into a buffer with a timestamp on every frame, even while the player is in a locked-out state. Reading input only when free is what loses the press.

2. Consume on state exit

When the lockout ends, check the buffer; if a buffered action is still within its window, execute it immediately. This makes slightly-early presses feel responsive.

3. Expire stale entries

Drop buffered inputs older than a short window (for example 120 to 150 ms) so a press made long before control returns does not fire unexpectedly later.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

The errors you never hear about are the ones quietly costing you players. Visibility turns them into a worklist.