Key mapping

[hikingpete]

First off, allow me to thank the parties responsible for the presence and pre-population of the KeyPrefs.xml - it has proven instrumental to my very ability to play this game.

I make use of the Colemak keyboard layout on the Linux platform. I can't guess at the scope of the issues I face, but I face them commonly, and they prove detrimental to my felicity and goodwill. The heart of the problem is that the key prefs are laid out assuming a qwerty layout, while the game sees the buttons I press as coming from a Colemak keyboard. I hope with every new game I play that I will encounter another game that side-steps my keyboard layout - interpreting the scan codes itself. I don't have a problem with qwerty mnemonics - these don't need to be translated - I just want to know that I can press the third button from the left on homerow to move right.

That's the core issue; and where it not for my struggle with the keyboard configuration, I might have said nothing. The issue is that remapping one key leads to remapping another. 'R' replaces 'S', 'S' replaces 'D', but what then, where to next? The easiest solution is a systematic remapping - start at the top, and simply press the key indicated by the existing binding as though I was typing on a qwerty keyboard. This is where the difficulty arises - and a clever developer might anticipate it given my lead-up. The remapping tool 'helpfully' clears conflicting keymappings. Since I don't know the bindings yet I'm left with a bunch of 'None' bindings all over the place, and I can't tell which ones are important to remap.

As I alluded to above, I found that KeyPrefs.xml was suitably pre-populated, and provided for me a decent workaround. Nevertheless, every time I encounter this issue it's a toss up whether I abandon the game in frustration or find a solution that works. I hope my ramblings can be of value to the developers. Let me reiterate that my preferred solution would be that the game would read scan codes - bypassing the OS for bindings, but obviously falling back to the OS interpretation for text entry (eg. chat). Failing that, better support for systematic remappings would be helpful. Nonetheless, having solved my own problem already, I leave this here simply to expound a scenario with which the developers may not be familiar. My thanks for taking the time to read and to understand.

[milon]

Would you be willing to upload your Keymap file for other users?  You're probably not the only one who uses a Colemak keyboard.