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Comment by mdaniel | Hacker News Reader

I have to be very disciplined about switching my layout back to US English before launching games because they seem insistent on using the mapping for WASD versus the keys for WASD. But, worse (IMHO): some games use the keys and thus I can't predict whether the game was coded correctly or not and thus I just gave up and made it part of my launch process

I have secret desires to convert one of my old MacBook Pro devices into a Steam-via-Proton setup to get out from under the tyranny of Windows but since gaming is designed to be a break from "work" ... that's why it's not already done

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Your computer doesn't actually know what the keys for WASD are. It just receives a number (commonly called scan code) for the pressed key from the keyboard, and has to use the mapping to determine which key that actually was.

There's some convention for which scan code to use for which physical position on a keyboard, but that's not correlated with what's actually printed on the key caps. E.g. on common QWERTY keyboards the "A" key will have scan code 4, but on AZERTY keyboards it will have scan code 20.

Games can probably get away by listening for the scan codes of the keys in the position commonly used by WASD, but it's a bit fragile, and they can't actually tell you what's printed on the keys they're listening to. The lack of consistenency is certainly annoying, though...

Scancode vs character code is what they are describing:

Games SHOULD use scancodes for positional mappings (like WASD) and rely on the system keymap to decide what letter to display them as. There is no "probably" here, the scancode is the scancode and the keymap is the keymap.

Games OFTEN use the character codes directly regardless if it's for a positional mapping or not. This requires explicit support in the game for each possible system keymap, otherwise you end up with nonsense mappings.

> Games can probably get away by listening for the scan codes of the keys in the position commonly used by WASD, but it's a bit fragile, and they can't actually tell you what's printed on the keys they're listening to. The lack of consistenency is certainly annoying, though...

The operating system knows how to map scan codes to characters based on the keyboard mapping the user has selected.

    Win32: MapVirtualKeyExA / MapVirtualKeyW
    MacOS: CGEventKeyboardGetUnicodeString / UCKeyTranslate
    Linux: xkb_state_key_get_utf8

Hell, glfw nicely wraps all of these up with glfwGetKeyName.

Stop reading character codes directly, use the scan code and when displaying them map it using the system API so people see the right freaking binding. It's not rocket science,

We've invested some time to improve this situation for the games we port, at least to some extent. Keyboard input is read as a combination of scan code + win32 virtual key information to determine the physical key pressed on your keyboard. This way the keybindings are (almost) independent of the keyboard layout.

However, we also reflect your current key bindings with dynamic button prompts that tell you which key to press in game. For this we translate the determined physical key back through the selected keyboard layout to figure out what the corresponding label on your keyboard might be.

Most of this is just win32 API shenanigans, but the following post provides a bit more detail on reading inputs this way.

https://blog.molecular-matters.com/2011/09/05/properly-handl...

Not sure about Macbook Pro, but I converted my Windows 11 gaming desktop to Linux and Steam with Proton works just fine for all the games I care about. The only game that didn't play was Starfield and that was fixed shortly after a few weeks.

This is the kind of slippery problem I would never think about but would make me want to break my keyboard if I encountered in real life.

I am very lucky that Win+spacebar switches, so it's low drama to execute, just some drama to remember. Insult to injury, and likely very related to the article's points: if I remember after launching the game, Win+spacebar is 50/50 on whether the game notices and thus I usually just pay the startup cost again if I forget rather than having things be in limbo

> I am very lucky that Win+spacebar switches, so it's low drama to execute, just some drama to remember.

Unless they've fixed this in the last few years, switching your input mode like that while World of Warcraft is running will cause some kind of crash that prevents you from using the in-game chat. This felt especially egregious because switching input modes is the kind of thing you want to do all the time if you're using the in-game chat.

There's a lot to be said for a consistent process that always fixes a problem, vs one that fixes the problem relatively permanently, inconsistently, and requires more memory.

That's easier than just changing the key bindings in game?

Option 1: remember to press Win+spacebar before launching game

Option 2: launch game, navigate to settings, write down on a sheet of paper what the current keybindings are (since one I press "." for "e" it's going to either whine or blank out whatever "." was mapped to when I started), repeat that exercise about 25 times per game, times the 15 games I have in rotation right now, feel that was a great use of my "downtime"

Option 2 has the added bonus of making it 50/50 whether the game help text knows I remapped, and thus says "press . to open door" or whether it continues to say "press e to open door" and I have to guess whether it means "their e" or "my e"

The way games ought to do keymapping is to just allow conflicts. If you map two functions to the same key, that key should do both things, until the player sorts it out. The keymapper can put a warning sign up, "conflicts with foobar", but it shouldn't remove the key from foobar, and it shouldn't say "I can't allow you to do that", either.

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