Using ESC Breaks Input

[=^..^= Jay.h]

I've been working on a Bear Build recently, and since it requires multiple restarts from bad luck and constantly repeating things, I started using the ESC key to skip past windows quickly. Unfortunately, doing so breaks a lot of the menus and in-game actions.

Here are a few scenarios I've used it:

Story event comes up (Meet Mick after very first fight), press ESC to close story window, pause menu comes up, press ESC again to close pause menu, continue playing.

Fight stats window comes up, press ESC to close window, pause menu comes up, press ESC to close pause menu.

End of day window comes up, press ESC to close window, pause menu comes up, press ESC to close pause menu.

After a few minutes of cruising through the game, multiple game windows and events get broken.

1. Ultimate Fights become unavailable - Even though the game tells me that the Ultimate Fights are today, the "FIGHT" button never shows up. This will continue for a few days while the countdown timer will show values like "Ultimate Fights -1/-2/-3 Day(s)." Sometimes a scheduled Rookie League fight will fix the issue, sometimes it doesn't. When the "FIGHT" button does finally appear, it still doesn't offset how many days I've lost from not being able to access the fight.

2. Character will walk in place - This happened in the Pizza Shop. I traveled from Silver's Gym to the pizza shop, then tried to click on Casey. My character began walking in place. Clicking on the background did nothing, highlighting/clicking Casey wouldn't do anything, and I couldn't use the map to travel anywhere. After opening a few menus, eventually my character stopped walking in place and the game resumed like normal.

3. Stuck on Workout - Inside of Silver's Gym, while working out on a machine, there's always the hourglass that prevents you from getting off and switching machines at the start. If there's an end of day or story event that comes up, and I close it quickly with ESC twice, the hourglass will not go away and I'm forced to stay on the machine until a hunger/sleep/exhausted message forces me off of the machine. This can also break the menu buttons on the side (map/character/skills/etc) from being clickable.

4. Breaking Clickable Buttons - The biggest scenario where this happened was at the start of a fight. I got to the 2nd fight in the Ultimate Fights, and I could not click on the chosen skills or the "FIGHT" button. I could hover over my available skills to see their stats, but I could not change the category to see other skills. The chosen skills could not be clicked to remove them, and bringing up the pause menu would not allow me to save and quit to the main menu. Once the pause menu closed, I still could not click on anything. In the end, I was forced to terminate the game process to close out. There are other times I've broken clickable buttons, but never in a way that forced me to terminate the game forcefully.

I'm not sure how the menus are programmed, but it seems that the pause menu forcefully closes game windows without calling the proper "this window has closed" code. The easiest solution I can see to this is code all of the main buttons (red X, green Accept, and the end of day FIGHT buttons on scheduled fights) to accept either ESC or a mouse click. Also, I suggest not calling the pause menu with ESC unless no other forward windows are present.

I do have a recorded video of this (it was during one of my speed sessions) which I can upload upon request.