[jarreboum]

Hi everyone.

I'm from one of these country where QWERTY is not the standard layout for keyboards. A few keys are not at their expected place (WASD is messed up), some other are unreachable (the top number line, I can not change weapon). I could change the keys in the "keyboard setup" in game, but sadly the special characters are not allowed.

I'm using
Ubuntu 10.04
EDuke32 2.0.0devel 20100704
keboard layout: French Other (AZERTY)

Could you please allow for a more "universal" keyboard setup? A russian user seems to have the same problem as seen on your wiki FAQ page.



[edit] changing the keyboard layout only doesn't help. you probably need to have your whole system in a foreign language (french, russian) to assess it.
I did it wrong.

[High Treason]

Much as I don't know too much about this, what if you opened EDuke32.cfg or EDuke32_binds.cfg in a text editor (The Gnome equivalent of Kate I suppose) and edited the key configurations in there? EDuke32_binds.cfg might be best to edit before starting a new game - it might work but back the originals up first in case it breaks something

Even if this does work it still doesn't really fix the problem and I agree that we need better keyboard support. if I can find my AZERTY keyboard I will play around with it and see what happens. Even some US layouts have problems sometimes, I use a US International layout and keys like apostrophe and right-alt cause problems because they wait for a second input to make special characters.

[TerminX]

I think one of the improvements in SDL 1.3 (not yet released) is supposed to be better support for stuff like different keyboard layouts. There's some SDL 1.3 support in EDuke32 svn if you want to try it... you'll need to pull SDL 1.3 from their svn and install it to a different location than SDL 1.2 (like /usr/local) and edit the Makefile.shared file in the EDuke32 source to look for sdl-config there instead (and then recompile of course).

[bioman]

Tested with SDL 1.3 and not seen better support for no QWERTY keyboards, there is also a problem with the mouse, it's not 'grabbed' by the game.
If I press the 'A' I got a 'Q' like with SDL 1.2.
Article about it.

Otherwise, there is a simple workaround, that can be used with SDL 1.2,
Just load the game with a QWERTY layout, setup keys/play and leave the game with a desired layout.
Here a bash script example:

#!/bin/bash

setxkbmap us
/usr/games/eduke32 $@
setxkbmap fr

You can replaces 'eduke32' by 'hrp' or 'polymer_hrp' if you are using the packages.


I have also noticed a problem with a key on Linux, here an entry of my cfg:
bind "\" "gamefunc_Next_Weapon"
That bind is saved but not loaded in-game.
Maybe a double '\\' while fix it somewhere in the code.

[jarreboum]

bioman, on Jul 12 2010, 03:35 PM, said:

#!/bin/bash

setxkbmap us
/usr/games/eduke32 $@
setxkbmap fr

Indeed, i used the graphical method by going through system / keyboard / layout, but that did not work. My mistake was probably that I did not remove my local layout and/or move qwerty on top.

I will use that as a temporary solution, it works great.



I would like to add another problem, i can not use some special keys to change the brightness, volume, swith the screen off or go standby. I'm playing on a laptop so these functions are accessed by pressing a "Fn" key plus a regular F1 to F12 key. The Wifi Fn+F2, thescroll up/down keys Fn+Up/Down and NumLock Fn+F11 work tho.

The inability to soft-switch off the screen and put the computer on standby is probably by design, but I wish I could change the sound volume and the brightness of the screen.

[TerminX]

That's really a distro issue and not a problem with any particular app.

[NNC]

The Z is next to T, and the Y is next to X in the brighter parts of the civilization.

[Sangman]

Ah so now the location of letters on a keyboard is a sign of how evolved a civilization is?

[jarreboum]

Ok this is an old post, but the problem still exists. One problem is the need to use setxkbmap to change layout. I have no problem with setxkbmap itself but I wished the other means of setting a keyboard layout were also working properly (using the graphical tools provided by Ubuntu / don't know their name sorry).

The problem really is that eduke32 doesn't accept any other input but ASCII: in the fr layout the number row 1234567890 is replaced by & é " ' ( - è _ ç and you can see half of these symbols are not recognised by the game and can't be mapped.

One solution would be to implement unicode. Another would be to register the keys code directly instead of their attributed ASCII value. I believe this is what Valve has done in its new linux version of Half-Life.
[edit] a third solution would be to integrate the setxkbmap solution in eduke32. But this is dirty.