Game Control Options and Hotkeys in 2.5
BFG
Member Posts: 2
I have been a long time lurker on this forum and haven’t posted here before. I was reading up on the debate about the 2.5 beta patch and came across a suggestion about making hotkey combos with control or shift available again. One of the moderators responded that few players use hotkeys which made it sound like it wasn’t a concern. This has compelled me to raise some awareness about the potential impact.
Alternate ways for controlling the game like hotkey mapping might seem a trivial matter, but for some players it can actually be quite important. I play BGEE and BG2EE in co-op with my son and nephew. My nephew is 13 years old and has cerebral palsy. As a result, he suffers from a form of dyspraxia which makes fine motor control challenging.
He can use a mouse but it's hard work for him. Clicking on small icons across the screen is awkward. It also takes time as the cursor speed has to be on a low setting. This can be frustrating for him when it takes a while to carry out successive game commands or when making unintended commands by clicking on neighboring icons by mistake. However, he has no issues using a specially adapted keyboard. Therefore, the more game commands that can be mapped via the keyboard, the easier it is for him to use a game.
The EE infinity engine games have a vast amount of commands that are accessed mostly through using the mouse and clicking on small icons. You can map most of these but quickly run out of keys especially when using spells. Adding key combos with control and shift, as has been suggested in a few other posts, would greatly increase the key mapping options and reduce the burden of precise mouse control. This would make a big difference in how my nephew can enjoy these games.
I don’t want to sound ungrateful; the EEs have already added invaluable functions that have made controlling the game with fine motor disability a lot more viable. Zoom, quick loot and permanent highlight cannot be praised enough in this regard! However, some additional tweaks could improve the game further for people like my nephew.
It has been pointed out that the hotkey combo function with control is currently in use for the debug commands and it certainly used to be available before the extended editions. So my hope is that it can be made available again for general hotkey mapping, ideally with options that also allow shift and alt or tripple combos like shift+control as is the case in many modern games. Even if it’s not that meaningful for the average player, we would be very grateful if this could be added in the near future.
Alternate ways for controlling the game like hotkey mapping might seem a trivial matter, but for some players it can actually be quite important. I play BGEE and BG2EE in co-op with my son and nephew. My nephew is 13 years old and has cerebral palsy. As a result, he suffers from a form of dyspraxia which makes fine motor control challenging.
He can use a mouse but it's hard work for him. Clicking on small icons across the screen is awkward. It also takes time as the cursor speed has to be on a low setting. This can be frustrating for him when it takes a while to carry out successive game commands or when making unintended commands by clicking on neighboring icons by mistake. However, he has no issues using a specially adapted keyboard. Therefore, the more game commands that can be mapped via the keyboard, the easier it is for him to use a game.
The EE infinity engine games have a vast amount of commands that are accessed mostly through using the mouse and clicking on small icons. You can map most of these but quickly run out of keys especially when using spells. Adding key combos with control and shift, as has been suggested in a few other posts, would greatly increase the key mapping options and reduce the burden of precise mouse control. This would make a big difference in how my nephew can enjoy these games.
I don’t want to sound ungrateful; the EEs have already added invaluable functions that have made controlling the game with fine motor disability a lot more viable. Zoom, quick loot and permanent highlight cannot be praised enough in this regard! However, some additional tweaks could improve the game further for people like my nephew.
It has been pointed out that the hotkey combo function with control is currently in use for the debug commands and it certainly used to be available before the extended editions. So my hope is that it can be made available again for general hotkey mapping, ideally with options that also allow shift and alt or tripple combos like shift+control as is the case in many modern games. Even if it’s not that meaningful for the average player, we would be very grateful if this could be added in the near future.
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Comments
maybe if we discuss here how it "should be done" and come to some agreement, we can post a feature request in redmine, describing what would be good from a user's point of view.
Personally, I support the suggestions BFG has made (for what that is worth) as they would certainly address all of the issues I can think of. That is having lots of key bindings allowing you to fine tune your spell command layout. Similar to Beleg my need is about speed and convenience. I simply hate having to click through multilayered menus to cast a spell all the time. Really takes the momentum out of battles when you have a lot of spell casters in your group.
One additional idea might be to make skills and abilities from non-spell casting classes available for key assignment as well? I mean by what BFG has said about having as many game commands accessable through the keyboard.
One thing to clarify: nobody ever said it wasn't a concern. What was said is the following: a player asked other users about keybindings in 2.5 and didn't get a response at first: "not many people use keybindings, this is the reason you don't get responses".
But very soon a developer replied: "Well, mixed news. The missing BG2 spells are now available for BGEE keybinding, but it doesn't look like we support shift-X keybindings yet.'
So not only this issue is known, but is also something that is not forgotten. So thanks again for a unique view on the matter, it's been passed to the team.
You, sir, is the awesome uncle.
Your suggestion fortyseven about making more abilities available is good and might make non spellcasting classes more interesting for someone like my nephew (although he is pretty set on priests and mages
JuliusBorisov I would like to assure you that no offense was taken by your reply in the other thread or anything else that has been said by the developing team. I was just worried the issue could go unrecognised as there hasn’t been much debate about it and I wouldn’t expect there would be as it is quite a specific problem. We all recognise the incredible work that has been done by the developers to lift this game. In the original version it probably wouldn’t be playable at all for my nephew due to the absence of zoom. Also I thank you for passing on my comments that’s much appreciated!
My issue is that party selection hotkeys (and only those, aka 1-6 and 0) no longer work, even if I rebind them elsewhere. After messing around awhile, I realized this is only true after I use modmerge (clean install of Dragonspear/BG1+portrait dlc). I found an old thread where people used to have similar symptoms with Azerty keyboards https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/9513/shortcuts-not-working (Im using Qwerty)
So I reinstalled again and used "DLCmerger" instead of modmerge, same problem. At any point using the backed up. non-merged chitin.key (508kb) solves the issue but obviously breaks the merge. Problem persists after deleting inis from MyDocuments. Never had this problem before and playing an infinity engine game without being able to select your party members with 1-6 is more annoying than I thought
Maybe I should have made my own thread but hey, if anyone has a solution great. Anyhow I would agree that keybinds are amazing and the more we have the better. You realize that even more when you lose some that you are used to