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).