Default keys

[Simon]

Brain dump from IRC yesterday.

Specific to NL and Icho:

• Icho doesn't use all the functionality.
• Icho uses the default layout.
• Icho uses the mouse to select skills, RR, nuke.
• Icho uses the keyboard to pause, and for everything that lacks a button.
• Icho likes how his common keys are memorable: [P] is pause, [Num-Minus] goes back 1 second, [B] goes back, [N] is next frame.
• Icho has played several other games that, like NL, pause on [P].
• Icho doesn't care if he has to reach over half of the keyboard for [Num-Minus].

Specific to NL:

• NL lacks buttons for core functionality, thus demands key memorization.
• Some defaults match L1's hardcoded bindings.
• Some defaults match a convention from L2/L3/L3D: [P] is pause.
• Some defaults violate a convention from L2/L3/L3D: [Enter] is fast-forward in all of these games. Yet fast-forward in NL is [F].
• Some defaults are on associable symbols.
• Some defaults are on whatever symbol happens to lie next on Qwerty to related functions: Savestate is [Enter], and load-state is [Backspace].
• There is a reason for every default binding in NL. But there is no overarching reason that governs all defaults.

Specific to Lemmings:

• L1 has few interesting keys other than the F-keys. We have discussed problems of F-keys in "Skill keys vs. positional keys".
• L1 has F11 for pause, where L2/L3/L3D all have [P] for pause.
• Lemmings games either don't offer fast-forward, or map it to [Enter].

Random usability finding:

• geoo has observed a newbie playing Lix once. The newbie first tried [Enter] to pause, then [Space].

-- Simon

[namida]

For pause - F11, P and middle-click are all assigned Pause by default. The last one in particular I have noticed is very appreciated. Prior to remappability, all three keys were hardcoded to pause for quite some time; including middle-click remaining hardcoded to pause when keys were  remappable but MMB/RMB weren't.

In many cases, the reason for the NL defaults are "these were Lemmix's defaults". Some were proposed (eg. Z/X for relative skill changing), others were a matter of "where's a free key for something that doesn't have any obvious key" (~ falls into this category).

For reference: http://nordicbots.com/?id=73&net=quakenet&cid=84924&year=2016&month=3&day=6
Discussion on hotkeys starts at around 21:37.