mouseless navigation
May. 12th, 2010 07:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysobelThe whole keyboard/mouse issue (aka Two Things Cannot Occupy The Same Physical Space Even If It Would Be Useful) has gotten me looking more into non-mouse mouse control. Even if I find a mouse that works better, it's easier to just keep my hands on the keyboard.
I am discovering that a) browser navigation can be a pita without a mouse (especially on forms that don't have good tab ordering), and b) neither WoW nor GW can be played mouseless.
Both games have arrow key (and, at least by default, awsd) navigation. Both games have ways to invoke skills by number. There are also certain things (such as opening your inventory or displaying the character pane) that can be done by keypress.
I've been playing more GW than WoW the last couple of days, mainly because WoW has a bunch more shit that needs setting up. (I was able to copy over the addons I use, but some of the settings didn't stick, so I need to reconfigure where things are displayed.) And, well. You can define keystrokes for some actions -- like targeting nearest / next / previous foe, nearest / next / previous item (loot), etc -- but not for others -- in particular, there is no set for targeting nearest / next / previous NPC. There's a keystroke for interacting (attack if hostile, talk to if npc, pick up if item, buy/sell if merchant, etc.) but no way to do anything with said interaction (accepting quests or quest rewards must be done by mouse, buying and selling stuff must be done by mouse, identing and salvaging must be done by mouse, transferring stuff to and from storage, or other bags, must be done by mouse, etc.)
Also, it treats left control/alt as separate from right control/alt (and in fact doesn't let you assign right control/alt to anything as far as I can tell), and -- probably because [control] and [alt] are commands by themselves, it doesn't allow keystroke combinations [and on an unrelated subject, wtf, firefox: 'combination' is acceptable, but 'combinations' gets a red highlight? as does uncapitalized firefox? and, for that matter, uncapitalized?] so you can't set different actions for K and shift-K and ctrl-K and alt-K.
...you can in WoW. Which is very nice. But you can't use keystrokes to loot -- it has to be done by, guess what, mouse. I can't think at all right now, so I can't recall all of what you can and can't do -- I can't, f'rex, remember if there's a way to target nearest/next NPCs; I do remember there's (now) a way to interact with them, except that it has to be a different keystroke than "attack". Selling stuff and inventory management is, again, entirely mouse-based.
And I know that something as complex as those games, it would be hard to make /everything/ possible by keystroke. But then I think about something like Vagrant Story (which I classify in my head as the same sort of game, even though it is not multi-player or online or even a recently-made game), which has ... how many controls are there on a playstation? Ten buttons (X O triangle square, L1 L2 R1 R2, start, and whateverthehell the other one is) and two joysticky things that could be considered the equivalent of arrow keys. And it handles inventory management, transfer in and out of storage, looting stuff, fighting, etc, just with those things. Granted, sometimes it's really freaking tedious (especially juggling things in/out of storage in order to combine them), and it's really not time-sensitive (why sure, you can take five minutes in the middle of heated battle to change armor and weapons and stuff; your enemies won't mind [search for "fire elemental" for the specific riff]), but it's /possible/. So why isn't it possible with the other games?
Sigh.
I am discovering that a) browser navigation can be a pita without a mouse (especially on forms that don't have good tab ordering), and b) neither WoW nor GW can be played mouseless.
Both games have arrow key (and, at least by default, awsd) navigation. Both games have ways to invoke skills by number. There are also certain things (such as opening your inventory or displaying the character pane) that can be done by keypress.
I've been playing more GW than WoW the last couple of days, mainly because WoW has a bunch more shit that needs setting up. (I was able to copy over the addons I use, but some of the settings didn't stick, so I need to reconfigure where things are displayed.) And, well. You can define keystrokes for some actions -- like targeting nearest / next / previous foe, nearest / next / previous item (loot), etc -- but not for others -- in particular, there is no set for targeting nearest / next / previous NPC. There's a keystroke for interacting (attack if hostile, talk to if npc, pick up if item, buy/sell if merchant, etc.) but no way to do anything with said interaction (accepting quests or quest rewards must be done by mouse, buying and selling stuff must be done by mouse, identing and salvaging must be done by mouse, transferring stuff to and from storage, or other bags, must be done by mouse, etc.)
Also, it treats left control/alt as separate from right control/alt (and in fact doesn't let you assign right control/alt to anything as far as I can tell), and -- probably because [control] and [alt] are commands by themselves, it doesn't allow keystroke combinations [and on an unrelated subject, wtf, firefox: 'combination' is acceptable, but 'combinations' gets a red highlight? as does uncapitalized firefox? and, for that matter, uncapitalized?] so you can't set different actions for K and shift-K and ctrl-K and alt-K.
...you can in WoW. Which is very nice. But you can't use keystrokes to loot -- it has to be done by, guess what, mouse. I can't think at all right now, so I can't recall all of what you can and can't do -- I can't, f'rex, remember if there's a way to target nearest/next NPCs; I do remember there's (now) a way to interact with them, except that it has to be a different keystroke than "attack". Selling stuff and inventory management is, again, entirely mouse-based.
And I know that something as complex as those games, it would be hard to make /everything/ possible by keystroke. But then I think about something like Vagrant Story (which I classify in my head as the same sort of game, even though it is not multi-player or online or even a recently-made game), which has ... how many controls are there on a playstation? Ten buttons (X O triangle square, L1 L2 R1 R2, start, and whateverthehell the other one is) and two joysticky things that could be considered the equivalent of arrow keys. And it handles inventory management, transfer in and out of storage, looting stuff, fighting, etc, just with those things. Granted, sometimes it's really freaking tedious (especially juggling things in/out of storage in order to combine them), and it's really not time-sensitive (why sure, you can take five minutes in the middle of heated battle to change armor and weapons and stuff; your enemies won't mind [search for "fire elemental" for the specific riff]), but it's /possible/. So why isn't it possible with the other games?
Sigh.