5 ms·
Less than one percent of their audience, of course, not less than one percent of all computer users. Is it still chauvinism if the game was only written in Eng
by sliverstorm 12y ago
Less than one percent of their audience, of course, not less than one percent of all computer users.
Is it still chauvinism if the game was only written in English in the first place?
- TillE 12y agoAlmost every German gamer (PC games are a big deal here) is willing to play games in English. Almost none of them have QWERTY keyboards.
- sliverstorm 12y agoI guess on the bright side there, to my knowledge Z & Y are not commonly used keys for PC games, and never as a primary key (like WASD). (I gather Germany is mostly QWERTZ)
- lambda 12y agoSure, but French keyboards are generally AZERTY, which breaks the WASD layout. Some countries also use QZERTY, also breaking the WASD layout.
- anonymoushn 12y agoIn platformers and shmups, it's common for arrows, lshift, z, x, and maybe c to be the only buttons used to control the character. Voxatron, for example, defaulted to this control scheme, but that game has very configurable controls.
- sliverstorm 12y agoAh, goes to show what kind of games I don't play much of.
- doodpants 12y agoWhat bugs me is that game developers seem to have standardized on WASD, whereas ESDF is more natural for those who touch type.
- rodgerd 12y agoThis may surprise you, but there are people who speak more than one language in the world, and the keyboards on their PCs are set up for only one of them.
- babuskov 12y agoMost of the people I know (myself included) who speak multiple languages have multiple keyboard settings installed in their OS. 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.
- bluerobotcat 12y agoI'm curious. Might it be that the multiple languages you're thinking of use different alphabets? 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).
- babuskov 12y agoI'm using US English and Serbian (Latin) keyboard all the time. The difference is that US one has W,Q,X and Y, and the Serbian one has Š,Č,Ć,Đ and Ž. Except for Z and Y all other characters have the same position (QUERTY vs QUERTZ). 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.