the siglum key ???

[Björnke von Gierke]

On 30 Oct 2010, at 09:34, Richmond wrote:

> Err . . . anybody know a way, within LiveCode/RunRev to detect an end-user's
> physical keyboard?????

I am someone who uses and analyses a lot of games, where keyboard features are often mapped to position instead of char-output. Basically the answer to your question is no. Sure, there are ways to find out some information about the layout, but keybord layouts are not normed in any way beyond "thats how they always did it".

A simple example is the difference of an older swiss-german mac layout versus an american layout (those being the two i have here right now):

for swiss layout vs us layout:
the row that starts with q has one more key at the rightmost position
the row that starts with a has one less key at the rightmost position
the row that starts with z doesn't start with z, it starts with <, and then continues with y (y and z are always switched in german layouts vs us layouts).
The return key is not a double key in width, but instead a double height (with some adjustment to width because the rows are shifted slightly compared to each other, producing a hook-looking key)
Instead of a second alt key to the right of the spacebar, there's a return key on my ibook (newer macs don't have that anymore)
Obviously a lot of chars are mixed and moved around, for example shift- and then the numbers at the top (from 1 to 0):
swiss german: +"*ç%&/()=
usa: !@#$%^&*()

now, on my windows pc (swiss german layout), there's an alt-gr key to the right of the spacebar, which allows the typing of funny chars like |,€,¢, etc.
there's also a windows and a menu key, which macs won't ever have (they have the command key instead).

And that's only comparing three keyboards that I have here. If you want to catalogue all keyboard layouts of the world, I'm sure you could sell big buck licenses to all the game developers who do this stuff on a far less sophisticated ground: Every user can adjust his preferred layout nilly willy, and only the most often seen ones are (maybe) build in. 

And then there's dvorak.

For example Starcraft 2, one of the biggest budget games of the year, has fixed layouts to reduce cheating vectors. these layouts are always bugged for a certain percent of the community, and the answer to those is: memorise or lose the game.


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