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Allow controls to be remapped / reconfigured As a left-handed gamer: yes please! I use the arrow-keys for movement with my right hand and have the mouse on the

Allow controls to be remapped / reconfigured As a left-handed gamer: yes please! I use the arrow-keys for movement with my right hand and have the mouse on the left. Nothing sucks more than to find out that a game has WASD hard-coded, or helpfully adds an AZERTY checkbox as if that covers all eventualities.

dkersten 6y ago
In this day and age I expect every game to allow control remapping, certainly on PC but even on console I feel it’s warranted, to the point where I get mildly annoyed when they’re not remappable, even if I don’t intend on actually doing it. I think a big part of that is I use colemak, so if a game uses layout-aware controls (rather that physical key location scan codes or whatever), then I can’t play with a keyboard unless I can remap it. I won’t change my layout just for a game, too much hassle (and I’ve always had weird issues about default layout when having multiple layouts setup for quick switching). Most PC games do allow remapping these days, thankfully. Browser game’s usually don’t but I don’t tend to play them anyway.
- Aerroon 6y ago
  You could use an autohotkey script to remap the keys. It's not elegant and is frustrating, but it can make a game playable. AHK by default suppresses the keystroke itself, which means that all you have to do is create a mapping of the keys to other keys in a script and run it. I use it to bind caps lock to a windows-wide microphone mute toggle and it works great.
SilasX 6y ago
Also, pass that on to Mozilla, which still doesn't allow Firefox extensions to remap controls (until a given tab has loaded).
gaucheph 6y ago
There's an annoying manifestation of this where some games only partially allow remapping controls. For example, when Cyberpunk 2077 was released, it was not possible to rebind to some keys or rebind some actions. Another pattern I've noticed is some games do not respect Windows' mouse button settings. If other left handed mousers are like me and swap the primary and secondary mouse buttons, they'll probably have noticed that some games ignore this setting and seemingly hard code primary and secondary mouse buttons to be left and right click respectively. The key bindings are understandable to me because nowhere in Windows does it let me set IJKL as my WASD. But I know it's possible to get the primary and secondary mouse button config from the OS but some games ignore or are ignorant of this fact. Wherever I rebind my keys, I usually start with movement from WASD to IJKL. For everything else, I basically mirror what the default setting is to the right side of the keyboard. F > H E > U R > Y Q > O C > N L Tab > any of P, Colon, Apostrophe, L square bracket L Shift> any of whatever I didn't use for L Tab X > Comma or M (though comma makes more sense because my right middle finger would type that so it matches developer intention for default setting) There's actually more keys to choose from on the right side of the keyboard that you can reach with your pinky. This is significant because in some games being able to press buttons while maintaining movement can be advantageous.
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  > The key bindings are understandable to me because nowhere in Windows does it let me set IJKL as my WASD. But I know it's possible to get the primary and secondary mouse button config from the OS but some games ignore or are ignorant of this fact. I'll chip in. As a developer, Unity and Unreal don't really expose that information, and generally devs will not fetch it on their own because that requires dealing with linking to Windows libraries, rather than letting the platform deal with that. Using Windows specific libraries seems like an anti-pattern with Unity too, because now your game is no longer cross platform.
  - seba_dos1 6y ago
    Time to either lobby for Unity and Unreal to implement it, or to use something better.
  - derefr 6y ago
    You'd think that rather than getting low-level events for "LMB Click" / "RMB Click", the Windows DirectInput API would be handing Unity events for "Primary Mouse Button Click" / "Secondary Mouse Button Click." OSes don't emit raw un-keymapped keysyms to apps, so why are they emitting raw un-mapped mouse-syms?
    - throwaway3699 6y ago
      Unity APIs have always been an incomplete mess. Big sprawling projects will do it themselves, with a proper action dispatch pattern somewhere, and small indie projects will do it the basic way, like so: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Input.GetMouseButtonDown.html https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Input.GetMouseButto... Meanwhile Unity has tried releasing several different input management solutions, none of which are particularly popular. With more exotic stuff like XR/VR or Steam Input it's even more of a mess.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  I genuinely was not aware that Windows lets you swap the left and right mouse buttons, and I've been building Windows games for nearly 20 years. Thanks for calling that out.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
Nothing is worse than hard-coded controls in general. Completely screws up my muscle memory. It's also disrespectful because the game designers think they know my preferences better than I do.

dkersten 6y ago

In this day and age I expect every game to allow control remapping, certainly on PC but even on console I feel it’s warranted, to the point where I get mildly annoyed when they’re not remappable, even if I don’t intend on actually doing it. I think a big part of that is I use colemak, so if a game uses layout-aware controls (rather that physical key location scan codes or whatever), then I can’t play with a keyboard unless I can remap it. I won’t change my layout just for a game, too much hassle (and I’ve always had weird issues about default layout when having multiple layouts setup for quick switching). Most PC games do allow remapping these days, thankfully. Browser game’s usually don’t but I don’t tend to play them anyway.

Aerroon 6y ago
You could use an autohotkey script to remap the keys. It's not elegant and is frustrating, but it can make a game playable. AHK by default suppresses the keystroke itself, which means that all you have to do is create a mapping of the keys to other keys in a script and run it. I use it to bind caps lock to a windows-wide microphone mute toggle and it works great.

SilasX 6y ago

Also, pass that on to Mozilla, which still doesn't allow Firefox extensions to remap controls (until a given tab has loaded).

gaucheph 6y ago

There's an annoying manifestation of this where some games only partially allow remapping controls. For example, when Cyberpunk 2077 was released, it was not possible to rebind to some keys or rebind some actions. Another pattern I've noticed is some games do not respect Windows' mouse button settings. If other left handed mousers are like me and swap the primary and secondary mouse buttons, they'll probably have noticed that some games ignore this setting and seemingly hard code primary and secondary mouse buttons to be left and right click respectively. The key bindings are understandable to me because nowhere in Windows does it let me set IJKL as my WASD. But I know it's possible to get the primary and secondary mouse button config from the OS but some games ignore or are ignorant of this fact. Wherever I rebind my keys, I usually start with movement from WASD to IJKL. For everything else, I basically mirror what the default setting is to the right side of the keyboard. F > H E > U R > Y Q > O C > N L Tab > any of P, Colon, Apostrophe, L square bracket L Shift> any of whatever I didn't use for L Tab X > Comma or M (though comma makes more sense because my right middle finger would type that so it matches developer intention for default setting) There's actually more keys to choose from on the right side of the keyboard that you can reach with your pinky. This is significant because in some games being able to press buttons while maintaining movement can be advantageous.

throwaway3699 6y ago
> The key bindings are understandable to me because nowhere in Windows does it let me set IJKL as my WASD. But I know it's possible to get the primary and secondary mouse button config from the OS but some games ignore or are ignorant of this fact. I'll chip in. As a developer, Unity and Unreal don't really expose that information, and generally devs will not fetch it on their own because that requires dealing with linking to Windows libraries, rather than letting the platform deal with that. Using Windows specific libraries seems like an anti-pattern with Unity too, because now your game is no longer cross platform.
- seba_dos1 6y ago
  Time to either lobby for Unity and Unreal to implement it, or to use something better.
- derefr 6y ago
  You'd think that rather than getting low-level events for "LMB Click" / "RMB Click", the Windows DirectInput API would be handing Unity events for "Primary Mouse Button Click" / "Secondary Mouse Button Click." OSes don't emit raw un-keymapped keysyms to apps, so why are they emitting raw un-mapped mouse-syms?
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    Unity APIs have always been an incomplete mess. Big sprawling projects will do it themselves, with a proper action dispatch pattern somewhere, and small indie projects will do it the basic way, like so: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Input.GetMouseButtonDown.html https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Input.GetMouseButto... Meanwhile Unity has tried releasing several different input management solutions, none of which are particularly popular. With more exotic stuff like XR/VR or Steam Input it's even more of a mess.
kevingadd 6y ago
I genuinely was not aware that Windows lets you swap the left and right mouse buttons, and I've been building Windows games for nearly 20 years. Thanks for calling that out.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

Nothing is worse than hard-coded controls in general. Completely screws up my muscle memory. It's also disrespectful because the game designers think they know my preferences better than I do.