I know the proportion of gamers who use alternate keyboard layouts is very small, but we get by fine almost all the time anyways, because games generally allow us to change bindings. Demigod (a game I love), unfortunately has the camera movement keys greyed out, so I can't both enjoy easy camera movement AND be able to type to my teammates at once. I see no reason why we need to be restricted in this manner; please, can you explain why we can't change those bindings, or give us this minor extra freedom.
Thanks!
Hey that is pretty odd I agree... and yay for Dvorak, did my thesis on why it failed to overcome qwerty despite being better ^^.
Wow, exciting. I taught myself Dvorak a few years back in high school, but have never actually met another person who can type it. As for why it failed, your paper would be quite an interesting read, because I honestly don't understand why it hasn't gained widespread acknowledgement. Anyways, it just struck me as odd that they accidentally screwed us independent people, and with luck it can be fixed in a patch soon.
From what I remember, there are two reasons why it failed - one is that there haven't been enough studies to conclude that it is better than qwerty (historical studies were very biased on both sides of the argument). The other is that even if you concede that Dvorak is better than Qwerty, the cost of training a typist up to proficiency in Dvorak is not worth the gain in efficiency. There was an article that went a step further to say that the money was better spent improving their existing Qwerty skills.
Regardless, I'm a big fan of letting users customize as many hotkeys as possible. In the mean time, I'd suggest hopping on a voice server and sticking with qwerty.
Heh, I can't quite claim to be in the same spot, as I'm a qwerty typist, I was interested in product adoption rates and memetics and dvorak made a perfect case study.
To summarise my studies as briefly as I can, I found the reasons were almost completely social-psychological. Qwerty already had such a massive foothold it was quite difficult to break through when everything was already being produced as qwerty and offering a new standard was a cost-increasing risk not enough companies were willing to try at the time. The cost of retraining could have been considered negligable though as dvorak had/has a body of evidence that arguably equally proficient typists have an average higher typing speed and accuracy on dvorak keyboards compared to their qwerty cousins, ontop of the lowered risk of RSI in some people. On a more public level, learning to type in a new format is a hassle for most people, and as the vast body of society aren't reliant on touch typing 90-110wpm for most of their professional day it doesn't provide enough benifit to warrant the grind of changing on your own volition. As you said Futile, the older studies were quite biased, but nowadays you can find a fair bit of arguing that tackles it a bit more objectively, since it's a 'case closed' topic, they 'lost the war' heh.
I tried to give it a go myself (changing my OS keyboard layout and then physically swapping my keys around), but as an impatient person I also just fell back to the devil I know better. Still, props to you for learning it propperly! And I hope they can open up those keybindings for my dvorak friends!
Spacebar + mouse for camera movement works wonders
That it does, also just found this in the gamereplay forum: Go to: C:\Users\YOURNAME\Documents\My Games\Gas Powered Games\Demigod\
Open: Game.prefs
UserKeyMap = {
['Shift-W'] = 'use_summon_2', ['1'] = 'control_demigod', ['0'] = 'control_minions_special', F2 = '', ['2'] = 'control_minions_all', ['5'] = '', F4 = '', ['7'] = 'control_minions_soldiers', ['6'] = '', ['9'] = 'control_minions_priests', ['8'] = 'control_minions_archers', A = 'use_inventory_1', E = 'use_ability_3', D = 'use_inventory_3', F = 'use_achievement', I = '', H = '', K = '', M = '', N = '', Q = 'use_ability_1', F1 = '', S = 'use_inventory_2', R = 'use_ability_4', W = 'use_ability_2', X = 'show_skills', ['Shift-Q'] = 'use_summon_1', ['Shift-E'] = 'use_summon_3', Z = 'ping_alert', ['4'] = '', ['3'] = 'control_minions_allplushero', F3 = '', P = '' }
And change to how you want it to be. Should override the greyed out keybindings, even if you can't change them in-game.
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