[RELEASE] Povray Planets 0.2

[Cmdr. Maegil]

It gets much, much worse - I almost despair each time I have to use a French AZERTY keyboard.

I think it got something to do about each country being self-regulatory on the matter, maintaining the cultural diversity or something to the effect... Just some "we're XXXish/an/ese/etc., so even our keyboards are different" nationalist nonsense.

[Commander McLane]

Not for all of them, for instance on a German keyboard the '*' isn't anywhere near the '8', and SHIFT-'8' would result in typing '('.

On non-Mac systems, keys are bound by location rather than character.

That must make mapping on non-std/non-English keyboards... Interesting - I've never noticed (Linux/Window) because I really use the keyboard having mapped most of my keys to my gamepad.

Out of curiosity - why - is this the case - it just seems wrong...

Binding by location rather than character does make sense in all the cases where a character doesn't exist on a foreign keyboard. On a German keyboard, for instance, neither a '`' nor a '\' exists, which means that with the default keyconfig.plist on a German Mac your Advanced Space Compass simply doesn't work at all, and you cannot view the comms log (another key that doesn't exist is '~', but fortunately that one isn't used in Oolite). You have to edit your keyconfig in order to get all functions of vanilla Oolite in working order.

[Cmdr. Maegil]

<rant>There's really no excuse to having to re-adapt each time one goes abroad, even to countries with the same language.
When the alphabet is different, it's understandable that the marking on the keys change - but even then, the physical layout of the keys is the same. To the point, there are more enough keys on a keyboard to map in Alt-Gr all the national accent marks and special characters used with the Latin alphabet, standardizing it to all users. What is amiss is political will.</rant>

[Mauiby de Fug]

<rant>There's really no excuse to having to re-adapt each time one goes abroad, even to countries with the same language.
When the alphabet is different, it's understandable that the marking on the keys change - but even then, the physical layout of the keys is the same. To the point, there are more enough keys on a keyboard to map in Alt-Gr all the national accent marks and special characters used with the Latin alphabet, standardizing it to all users. What is amiss is political will.</rant>

One of my friends uses Dvorak, and another used to use Colemak, but now has a custom arrangement based on a sample of text he sent to a website to determine which keys he uses most frequently. And both have extensively mapped what happens when various modifier keys are used, to the extent that they can get all Greek letters, and most mathematical symbols/letters as well. Needless to say that nobody tends to borrow their laptops!

[JensAyton]

That must make mapping on non-std/non-English keyboards... it just seems wrong...

On the contrary, binding by location is the Right Thing for games. It means the gameplay experience is independent of the key mapping; the key next to caps lock fires the laser, regardless of whether using it in a word processor produces “a” or “q” or “ش”. It does cause a problem of documentation, which Oolite punts on; a decent keyboard configuration UI with Unicode support would fix this.

There's really no excuse to having to re-adapt each time one goes abroad, even to countries with the same language.

You know that you can change the keyboard mapping, right? :-) Requiring people with more interesting orthographies to use a meta-key combo every time we want a hëavy mëtal ümlaut is, to be frank, a ridiculous solution.

[Eric Walch]

You know that you can change the keyboard mapping, right?

But it is not that obvious on current mac systems. In the pre-OSX 10 time I used resedit to remap some keys. In particular I use the Ø quite a lot and the § symbol hardly ever, so I want the Ø-key easy accessible.

With osx you have to know you must create a folder with name 'keyBindings' in the library. And inside that folder you must put a plist file with the name: 'DefaultKeyBinding'. I only learned last year how to do it and created following plist:

Code: Select all

 {
"§" = ("insertText:", "Ø");
}

But than, it works like a charm.

[submersible]

Wow - did this topic take a tangent! I like the advice about disabling the HUD - I forgot all about that.

[JensAyton]

With osx you have to know you must create a folder with name 'keyBindings' in the library.

For our purposes here, going to System Preferences→Language & Text→Input Sources and selecting your layout of choice should be sufficient.

[Duggan]

Is the link in the OP broken ? I can't seem to re down load the planets on my clean install of oolite.

[Cody]

Is the link in the OP broken ?

Yep... the link ain't working.

[submersible]

Is the link in the OP broken ? I can't seem to re down load the planets on my clean install of oolite.

It's back again.