I'd really like to know what the spec status on that is, and whether other browsers implement it.
For instance, in Portal 2, to check whether the player wants inverted controls:
In other genres / types of games, especially where you don't control exclusively one character / vehicle from a fixed first/third person viewpoint, it is drastically less common.
The problem is every second working on something that really matters, to what, <1% of the population is something that you aren't working on that is more important. Not to mention the extra overhead of testing and maintaining that system. It might be a valid gripe with a AAA game dev but complaining about your fairly rare corner case is just picking nits.
It's fairly breathtaking chauvinism to assert that keyboard layouts are relevant to less thatn one percent of the population.
Is it still chauvinism if the game was only written in English in the first place?
(I gather Germany is mostly QWERTZ)
The problem is that game API's often map keys to hardware keys and not to the characters that OS sends them.
Still, every serious game (be it indie or not) should allow you to rebind the keys. Unless it's a quick-hack project there is no excuse to skip on that. I don't buy the "every second counts" argument at all. If you can't spare time to implement the key binding inside the game, let the user edit a config file or something similar.
I ask because that's (in a way) a much simpler situation to deal with. If you're dealing with different alphabets then you will notice from the first keypress if you need to change the keyboard layout.
In contrast, when switching between AZERTY and QWERTY, you might not notice that you're using the wrong keyboard layout until you have finished typing two sentences with three silly typos.
A similar problem occurs on mobile operating systems if you use the same layout for different languages but have autocorrect turn off. You might finish two sentences and notice the spellchecker 'corrected' five words. This is because there is no visual indication as to what language your keyboard is set to (on iPhone the language is displayed only for about two seconds after you switch keyboards).
I'm also using Hungarian which is also Latin and has Ő,Ú,É,Á and Ű. The other keys are the same.
Since I have three quite similar layouts, I always have to be careful which one is currently active.
And I'm also using Serbian Cyrillic which is completely different alphabeth.
In Belgium we use a version of AZERTY that's optimized for Dutch and French. Naturally, it works great for English too. That is one reason why the notion of switching keyboard layouts when switching between languages with the same alphabet struck me as odd.
Nowadays I use an Apple US-QWERTY keyboard. It can be annoying when I need to enter diacritics, but it's great for programming. I never switch between keyboard layouts.
If you switch between programming and something else often, it can become a PITA to switch the layout all the time.
The question is not 'do they exist'. The question is, 'how many'? More specifically, how many are in the target market? It is unrealistic to expect shoestring-budget indie games to cater to every person on the planet.
Now how many hours does it take to implement a basic usability feat such as rebindable keys?
I agree that if you're spending a week or two to mash up a shitty excuse for game, then the fifteen to thirty minutes to make keys rebindable might be prohibitive. I hope this is not indicative of indie games' quality today, but if it is, then the people in this thread are right to criticize these games for it.
I'm pretty sure though that most real (indie or not) games aren't slapped together in a week. No, you're spending hundreds of hours at a minimum on design, code, assets, testing, marketing, all that. Even if you needed a few hours to make the keys bindable (unlikely unless your code was horrible spaghetti to begin with), it's still going to be far below 1% (bullshit figure) of total development time.
I can assure you that more than 1% of people would find it a useful feature. In Europe alone you have a few hundred million people who are almost guaranteed to have a keyboard layout different from US-QWERTY. As far as games go, we're in the same market even if English isn't our native language.
Even in the English speaking Americas you have people who happen to use a layout other than QWERTY. And you have people who use e.g. split ergonomic keyboards (with or without QWERTY), on which some bindings are just unusable. For example, the Kinesis Advantage Pro is contoured such that the fingers sit naturally in the home position. Index finger on F. In this position, ESDF is very usable. WASD is completely unusable. Even on a contourless split keyboard some bindings need to be changed because it's hard to reach for the other side of the split (the other hand is using the mouse).
Then you have some left-handed people who use the mouse with their left hand...
And whatever happened to user preference, God forbid? You can have a perfectly normal keyboard and a standard US-QWERTY layout, and you can still find that you would prefer to play the game with different bindings.
Really, bindability is basic usability and it's not hard to implement. It wasn't a problem in the 90s, not even for small indie shops. Yes, a few developers forgot or neglected to do it, usually out of ignorance. But they never gave these bullshit excuses about time and money and oooh every second counts...
The less defensible outcome is when the QWERTY assumption remains 'til the end, and the devs just want to ship the damn thing already, so the proper alternate keyboard layout/non-360 controller/etc. support gets cut and the burden is pushed onto the users. This sucks, but is somewhat defensible because if you are a gamer in France or whatever, you are probably used to needing to switch your keyboard layout or rebind your keys in the same way that English players of Japanese PC games are used to needing to use a Japanese locale, or that people with non-360 controllers are used to needing to use an XInput wrapper: we hate it, but we've already dealt with the problem once, so doing it again isn't a big deal.
Some of us hate it and just don't play these player-hostile games. I think that games that are meant to be played will respect the player and treat her dearly. Games that exist just for the buck though... oh well.
I used to jump through hoops myself. For example, I rebound keys in some older Touhous by disassembling and modifying the binary.
These days I just can't be bothered. There are more games than I could play in a lifetime, so I have plenty to choose from. And if/when game developers treat me like shit (whether it be with DRM or something else), I'm principled against playing their game. "Go away, you're not our target audience, we don't care about you."
I try to focus the little time I have on games whose authors really want everyone to play and enjoy. The more effort they put into that, the more attention they deserve. If they respect my freedom, that's better still. And that is my idea of humble. I hate how the word is used to market a bundle of games on sale...
Truly caring about the player is one field where the indie scene could really shine, compared to the big corps who mass-produce big titles for the biggest market. Unfortunately even the indies seem to have other priorities.
And switching to a layout you don't normally use absolutely sucks for e.g. in-game chat.
It's not the right solution, it's a sad workaround.
Things get harder still if you need to rebind keys because of the physical arrangement of the keys on your keyboard. In this case, you might have to create a custom layout for each game.. screw that.
Windows does this. Its horrible. It also doesn't remember what window has what layout between sessions, so you have to manually set the layout each time. If the game is a fullscreen game its even more effort because if you alt-tab out, it is no longer the focused window (and therefore changing the layout does NOT apply to the game.. frustrating).
That is, if I want to change the keyboard layout for GameX, I must start GameX, minimize it, change keyboard layout (and hope that it applied it to GameX - often it does not), maximize GameX.
Alternatively, I have to remove Colemak as a keyboard layout and set qwerty as the only layout. This is even more effort.
Basically, in windows, changing keyboard layout to play games is not a viable solution. Believe me, I've tried. I don't play those games anymore...
>There's no such thing a lazy game developer.
The quality of some indie games out there really point in another direction, but if you wanna argue that these games don't have to uphold to a certain level of quality on the most basic stuff like key rebinding systems then I guess I can't stop you.