David Megginson said: > Jim Wilson wrote: > > > Sorry for the dumb question: why are they offending? I'm in favor of limiting > > aircraft specific key bindings to a very small number of keys (like 1 or 2), > > but I'm also not clear why the input binding configuration needs to be handled > > differently than it is now. > > It's a layering violation: I know that sounds like a technicality, but it > has serious effects on usability and system management. > > Once we set up a GUI for bindings, the user should not be surprised by > having new, unrequested key bindings appear simply because (s)he chose a > different airplane. For example, if the user binds '/' to fire an > afterburner then loads a plane that uses '/' to deploy slats, we have broken > the prime directive of user apps and discarded the user's input without > warning. The only reason this hasn't been a problem so far is that changing > key bindings without a GUI is too complicated for non-power users. > > From a management point of view, let's say that we decide to use '/' by > default to open a save file. With the current system, that will work fine > until the user happens to load a plane that uses '/' for something else, and > then it will fail to work, even if the user switches back to the original > plane, because the rebinding will outlive the aircraft that triggered it. > > So, let's see if we can fix this: keyboard.xml is long overdue for a rewrite > anyway. >
My earlier thought on this is that we should allocate aircraft specific keys by creating a dummy binding in keyboard.xml that would "reserve" the key. This came up in a discussion a few weeks ago. We could simply reserve maybe 2 or 3 or some small number that can be used. And they would be purposefully held to a very small number so that only features that are truly aircraft specific would be included. One idea on this that I haven't really worked out would be separating the functional properties of the bindings from the keys that make them work. So basically you'd have a configuration of "named bindings" that could be attached to keys or buttons. All the property tree references, scripts, and so on would be in the named bindings xml. Anyway...just a vague notion. Best, Jim _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
