Oolite Bulletins

I have made a keymap for Oolite, and I think it turned out rather nice. So my plan was to make it available to anyone who wants it. To be fair, I have also started on a Mac version, but need some help.
How does Oolite use the number pad on Mac, if at all?
Also, since there are several versions of the Mac keyboard out there, what would be the most representative layout? (Standard and laptop).

Gimi wrote:

I have made a keymap for Oolite, and I think it turned out rather nice. So my plan was to make it available to anyone who wants it. To be fair, I have also started on a Mac version, but need some help.
How does Oolite use the number pad on Mac, if at all?
Also, since there are several versions of the Mac keyboard out there, what would be the most representative layout? (Standard and laptop).

No idea about the number pad, my keyboards don't have any (I'm using the compact keyboard for my desktop). My laptop's keyboard has the en-US layout, my desktop's keyboard has the de-DE layout. Does that information help?

maik wrote:

No idea about the number pad, my keyboards don't have any (I'm using the compact keyboard for my desktop). My laptop's keyboard has the en-US layout, my desktop's keyboard has the de-DE layout. Does that information help?

Not really. Country layout will be English on my map. But Apple has released different keyboards over the years, changed some symbols on the keys, increased and decreased the number of function keys, assigned different default functions to the function keys, moved some keys around, and so on. So my question is really, which version of the apple keyboard is most representative.

Gimi wrote:

So my question is really, which version of the apple keyboard is most representative.

I don't understand which information you want. How do I find out which version mine is?

You can completely disregard the function keys. They're not used in Oolite at all. Each time we're writing about 'F5' for instance, what we actually press is '5', the number key one row below the function keys. (At least that's what I do. I've never used the function keys with Oolite. Why pressing a two-key combination when you can get away with pressing just one key?)

maik wrote:

Gimi wrote:

So my question is really, which version of the apple keyboard is most representative.

I don't understand which information you want. How do I find out which version mine is?

No idea. I did a search on google for pictures of Mac keyboards (desktop and laptop), and google came up with quite a few different layouts. So, being a bit confused, I decided to ask here. I have started doing the layout with the most basic desktop (with num pad and 16 function keys) keyboard I could find.

The keys used by Oolite are of course represented on all of them, but I thought I would ask here for aesthetic reasons only.

Commander McLane wrote:

You can completely disregard the function keys. They're not used in Oolite at all. Each time we're writing about 'F5' for instance, what we actually press is '5', the number key one row below the function keys. (At least that's what I do. I've never used the function keys with Oolite. Why pressing a two-key combination when you can get away with pressing just one key?)

Only one keypress required on PC's as well, but the "1" key and the "F1" does exactly the same thing, e.g. duplicated functionality. I take it that the function keys are not used at all by Oolite on Mac. If that is the case, a note should be made of that on the Oolite Reference Sheet.

Gimi wrote:

Only one keypress required on PC's as well, but the "1" key and the "F1" does exactly the same thing, e.g. duplicated functionality. I take it that the function keys are not used at all by Oolite on Mac. If that is the case, a note should be made of that on the Oolite Reference Sheet.

No, the function keys work just fine on the Mac version. Like the PC, the number keys and the function keys do exactly the same things.

Disembodied wrote:

Gimi wrote:

Only one keypress required on PC's as well, but the "1" key and the "F1" does exactly the same thing, e.g. duplicated functionality. I take it that the function keys are not used at all by Oolite on Mac. If that is the case, a note should be made of that on the Oolite Reference Sheet.

No, the function keys work just fine on the Mac version. Like the PC, the number keys and the function keys do exactly the same things.

Thank you. How about the number pad, is that used?

Gimi wrote:

No idea. I did a search on google for pictures of Mac keyboards (desktop and laptop), and google came up with quite a few different layouts. So, being a bit confused, I decided to ask here. I have started doing the layout with the most basic desktop (with num pad and 16 function keys) keyboard I could find.

Svengali is currently developing a small tool for creating custom keyconfig files on al platforms, so talk with him to avoid double work.

Doing some research for mac keyboard layouts myself I thought, I better look on apples site itself. There is a page with keyboards for different languages. You can enlarge them but all look the same. ('qwerty' for germany, france etc.) only japan seems to be correct, so they do use different pictures on that page. Very stupid to add an enlarge function on a page were the enlarged stuff is wrong in the first place.

But even the shown keyboard does not look like any I have seen for the mac. In Holland we use the US keyboard and the mac version has always had the ' key between the shift and the z key. On the apple site they are shown on the windows location.

One thing I found is that there is no "Insert" key on the mac. And the 'fn' key that is on that location on a mac does not do anything in oolite.

About the numpad keys: Oolite does recognises them as separate keys, but internally they are mapped to the asci value of the plain number keys so in play no difference between the two is seen.

Gimi wrote:

Thank you. How about the number pad, is that used?

I'm not sure, to be honest ... I've not used it myself, and I don't know if there's a discernible difference between pressing e.g. the number 5 key along the top of the keyboard and the number 5 key on the keypad. I can check but it'll not be until this evening at the earliest.

Edit: ninja'd!

Eric Walch wrote:

Svengali is currently developing a small tool for creating custom keyconfig files on al platforms, so talk with him to avoid double work.

I'm aware of his work. My map will be nothing more than a pretty picture in PowerPoint showing the default layout, editable by the player if he can open the file in PowerPoint (and/or Open Office I hope) I made it for myself as a reference when I started editing the layout in my own game so that I easily could reference my changes. I can just drag the keys around in PowerPoint to show the changes.

Eric Walch wrote:

Doing some research for mac keyboard layouts myself I thought, I better look on apples site itself. There is a page with keyboards for different languages. You can enlarge them but all look the same. ('qwerty' for germany, france etc.) only japan seems to be correct, so they do use different pictures on that page.

I'll only be making an English keyboard version of the map. My problem is the different versions Apple have made with different number of keys and some keys that are moved around. I just wanted to use the most common/representative layout for the English keyboard. I will have a look at the page and see if it helps.

Eric Walch wrote:

But even the shown keyboard does not look like any I have seen for the mac. In Holland we use the US keyboard and the mac version has always had the ' key between the shift and the z key. On the apple site they are shown on the windows location.
One thing I found is that there is no "Insert" key on the mac. And the 'fn' key that is on that location on a mac does not do anything in oolite.

These differences in layout is the reason I'm asking. I'm drawing the conclusion that there is no consensus, and will go ahead with the simplest versions I can find for both desktop and laptop.

Eric Walch wrote:

About the numpad keys: Oolite does recognises them as separate keys, but internally they are mapped to the asci value of the plain number keys so in play no difference between the two is seen.

Thank you, same as the other number keys then.

Eric Walch wrote:

About the numpad keys: Oolite does recognises them as separate keys, but internally they are mapped to the asci value of the plain number keys so in play no difference between the two is seen.

Really? When I was using my old laptop which had a number pad, I'm pretty sure that some of the number pad keys corresponded to pitch, roll and yaw, and the others did nothing. This was on Ubuntu, but it seems odd that there would be this sort of difference...

Mauiby de Fug wrote:

Eric Walch wrote:

About the numpad keys: Oolite does recognises them as separate keys, but internally they are mapped to the asci value of the plain number keys so in play no difference between the two is seen.

Really? When I was using my old laptop which had a number pad, I'm pretty sure that some of the number pad keys corresponded to pitch, roll and yaw, and the others did nothing. This was on Ubuntu, but it seems odd that there would be this sort of difference...

On PC's (Windows and Linux) Oolite functions are mapped to the arrow keys on the numeric pad + pitch/roll as you describe. On Mac the number pad is slaved to the other number keys from what I understand, and thus can not have a separate function.

I see. A most interesting difference!