Key Binding

Erk · Post by **Erk** » Thu Dec 27, 2007 12:33 am

I think this is a feature that really needs to be integrated right into VS's main engine. In many such complex games, I and a lot of users use the key binding interface as a quick help file, for one thing: it's a great ingame reference sheet to the functions of certain keys. Further, because it uses the entire keyboard, VS is presently inaccessible to some users. I can play it, but a lot of it is very frustrating in the defaults: for example, I cannot pause the game as I have no pause key, and I have to hold down + for several seconds to max out my throttle as i have no full throttle key. These are just two, there are a lot more functions I'm missing. One of the biggest nuisances is that I can't use time compression while running in windowed mode, as f9 and f10 are used for window controlling commands by macOSX. On top of that, on a mac, using the ctrl key is a nuisance. It would be nice to remap the ctrl-bound keys to use the command button instead... but at present, I can't tell if that is possible even by editing the config files. Enough griping, you get the picture. Some of this I can fix by text editing the config file, which is fine for beta but needs to be worked out eventually.

Just food for thought: I don't think this would be too hard of an interface to integrate into the flight computer and it would greatly improve VS's playability, I think: probably more than some have given it credit for, given its usefulness as an ingame quick reference sheet.

Post by **loki1950** » Thu Dec 27, 2007 1:18 am

That would indeed be useful but would require a complete rewrite of how the game initializes everything ATM any change in the config file needs a restart to take effect.The Mac keyboard is a bit of a problem as are non USA layouts some of this will most likely improve when we move the graphics functions to the ORGE libs as it uses a plug-in system for I/O.The comm and view-point keys where swapped in the beta to make them usable on the Mac

I guess they forgot about time compression as it is really a debugging tool aggressive use can crash the game.

Enjoy the Choice

Post by **ace123** » Thu Dec 27, 2007 9:35 am

It would actually be relatively easy to allow key-bindings settings to be changed in-game... however, saving those key bindings is very hard because of the way the configuration file is formatted.

I agree that it ought to have some configuration mechanism, and with many days of work it might even be possible to add in an interface, although most settings would still require a restart to take effect.

If you are interested you could try out the mac alpha release (which you can find by digging through the news section of the homepage)