Make non-qwerty keyboards as easy to use as qwertyÂ’s

[gillux]

Currently, the default key bindings are arranged for qwerty keyboards. Whoever uses an alternative layout has to go through the control options to rebind all the different keys. For example, every French user have to rebind the A, Q, Z, W, and M keys. Dvorak and Bépo users have to rebind every single key. Unvanquished should be made equally easy to configure, whatever the keybord layout is.

The voice say menu should also be adapted. Currently, azerty users can’t use it because they can’t type numbers. On azerty, you have to use the shift modifier to type numbers, which doesn’t work (and would be unconveniant anyway). I think that’s because the shift key doesn’t act as a modifier anymore in the game.

We could solve this problem the following way.
Add a “Keyboard layout“ entry in the “first run” options window, that allows the user to choose among common layouts like qwerty, azerty… Get the current keyboard layout configuration from the system (e.g. from Xorg in unixes, maybe Wayland in the future), and make it the default choice for that option. This way, the user could change it if we got it wrong, though that ideally won’t happen. From that option, remap the default key bindings accordingly.

Make the voice menu keys configurable so that they can be changed by the binding initialization system described above. Or maybe use the F1 to F9 keys instead (F1 to F4 keys doesn’t seem to trigger vote while inside the voice say menu).

[ViruS]

There should be something in the installer for something like:
Do you use a QWERTY keyboard?
Yes -> Discontinue and exit setup
No ->
AZERTY?
{
Yes -> Do you want to reset your binds to the default controls for an AZERTY keyboard layout?e
{
Yes -> Exec binds-azerty.cfg; Discontinue and exit setup
No -> Discontinue and exit setup
}
No ->
<Another keyboard type here>
Yes
{
*repeat
}
Else
Set your direcitonal keys, binds whatever now; Discontinue and exit setup

[Ishq]

Would probably be possible via alternate default.cfgs or something similar. Would you happen to be able to create a decent layout for your layout and give it to us? Most of us don't have access to such a keyboard.

[ViruS]

Hmm thinking of which, when I went to paris a few years ago I remembered the bindings auto-rebounded for the wasd keys (just how the game detects if a "command" key exists if its a mac) but I also remembered I couldn't evolve because the substitute for 'q' didn't work. Unvanquished doesn't do anything similar?

[gillux]

I wonder how you will do that? Debian does not use any xorg.conf by example. Besides, I do not think that Wayland will handle keys. Unlike X servers, it only plays with screen, not with inputs which are managed directly by kernel nowadays.

It’s not in xorg.conf anymore because nowadays Xorg gets configured by other means. Yet, this configuration setting exists somewhere, otherwise nobody would have his keyboard configured. The setting can be queried directly from the X server on which Unvanquished is running. For instance setxkbmap can get this setting, one could have a look at its source code.

I think there is an easier way (for user at least) which is to use the content of $LANG to guess which layout is probably used (dvorak and bépo even if they are better are not so widely used, right?).

You’re assuming that people using their system in language X also use the keyboard layout sold in the country of that language. While this is likely, it’s certainly not true, so it should be avoided.

The general idea is that the user already took care of setting his keyboard layout during the installation/configuration of his OS, so the layout setting can be certainly queried or red somewhere.

[gillux]

Would probably be possible via alternate default.cfgs or something similar. Would you happen to be able to create a decent layout for your layout and give it to us? Most of us don't have access to such a keyboard.

I can do that. Thinking of which, I’m wondering how to remap keys like T, binded to talk by default. Should we use the key located at the same position on the other layout? Or the T key of the other layout? For instance it would become Y in dvorak. Or use the first letter of the translation of the word « talk » into the main language of the layout? For instance talk translate to parler in French so this would mean the P key. I’d go for the first choice, but what do you think?

[Ishq]

You should pick a location that is reasonably close to the movement keys.

[Anomalous]

I do not think that asking things in the installer is a good thing. Packages are already broken for Debian (need to download stuff by hand) and inserting questions could make things worse.

Broken in what way? If you can help to fix things, by all means provide patches…

[velociostrich]

Besides, I do not think that Wayland will handle keys.

Only adding to the confusion is that Canonical is now developing (yet another) display server, because apparently Wayland n̶o̶t̶ ̶i̶n̶v̶e̶n̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶e̶, erm, i̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶g̶o̶o̶d̶ ̶e̶n̶o̶u̶g̶h̶... uh, different.

I do not think that asking things in the installer is a good thing.

Agreed. Users should not have to use the installer to be able to select which keyboard they use: this should be configurable from in-game.

EDIT: WHOOPS! Double post. Delete'd.

[danmal]

It should be possible to allow selection of mirrors for the installer but there's no easy way to select SF mirrors due to two reasons.
1) No easy way to get available SF mirrors. As far as I can tell SF doesn't make it easy to query which mirrors hold a copy of a particular file
2) No guarantee that all files will be available on one mirror. The installer needs to download 20+ files and SF doesn't guarantee that all of a projects files will be on one mirror.

I could be wrong about the above two points. The alternative is to get some other mirrors (I think someone was offering a European mirror) and offer SF + those other mirrors. I can't work on adding this feature into the installer atm because I have to concentrate on passing all my classes at Uni atm but in the next month or so I can probably do something.