Oolite Bulletins

Oolite 1.73.4
Ubuntu 9.10 Acer 5332 Laptop

Unable to use certain keys to play game, for example
TAB key - energy bomb have to remap sorry works
# key - wont function
/ key -wont function
haven't tested following keys but assume will have similar problems
~ @ ' : ; ? > < , . + - { } [ ] \ |
has any one else reported this or is having similar problem?
With limited amount of spare keys on keyboard this is quite annoying.

First and obvious question: Are you sure that your keyconfig.plist has these keys correctly defined?

You can download a default keyconfig.plist here. http://www.box.net/shared/1hu9xgy4b9

Yes its an old oxp i created which has been tested on previous occasions.
If i change the event that is defined for keypress "#" to a letter say "l" it works, if i change it back again it does not respond.

All keys respond in linux as they should in programs (except Oolite) Open Office Firefox etc and correspond to appropriate key pressed.

Just checked on Freedoom (Doom clone if you haven't played it) and rebinded run key to the # key and it works perfectly OK.

IIRC Oolite uses the American keyboard layout, so it might be that.

Phantom Hoover wrote:

IIRC Oolite uses the American keyboard layout, so it might be that.

When pressing the key that corresponds to # key on my keyboard on every other package it generates a # symbol so should that make a difference?
If it did surely other uk keyboard users would have this problem (was working ok on windows with uk keyboard)

What Phantom Hoover says is correct (except under Mac OS X). "#" should correspond to shift-3 (the US keyboard location of #), regardless of logical or physical keyboard layout.

Ahruman wrote:

What Phantom Hoover says is correct (except under Mac OS X). "#" should correspond to shift-3 (the US keyboard location of #), regardless of logical or physical keyboard layout.

On my keyboard shift-3 is £ in game this works but i want to use uk # key.
When i was running windows it if i told it to use the uk # key it would use that key.

You should really incorporate a redefine keys setup from inside of Oolite

Is the American layout because it was written for the Mac? It would seem a worthwhile thing to fix, given that a majority of the users are likely to be Windows users from the UK.

It was working fine on my Windows / Oolite install, I now solely use Linux and it appears to be a problem.

Phantom Hoover wrote:

Is the American layout because it was written for the Mac?

No, it’s an SDL thing.

The SDL position is essentially correct: binding keys by position rather than key value is the Right Thing for games. The problem here is that key configuration involves fiddling with files in the first place. I do want to switch to a decent in-game configuration screen, but we don’t have the infrastructure in place and we need to prioritise working towards a “stable” release.

Looking at the US layout, there is actually no key corresponding to your keyboard's "#" so I'm afraid you're momentarily out of luck there. It's entirely possible that "#" was added as a purely windows hack, so we might be able to transfer that bit of the code to linux.

However, "/" is in exactly the same position in both layouts, so I've no idea why it's not working, will try to investigate & report back...