gamer_extreme_101
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I was looking online for keyboards a couple of minutes ago, and I noticed that more and more keyboards are missing numberpads, which strikes me as being silly. Personally, I would never buy a keyboard without a numberpad even if I never played DROD.

So, I'm asking the DROD community how they stand on it. It is a serious DROD related topic, so I would really like to hear your input.

____________________________
--That guy with a million different aliases since he doesn't like this name anymore.

Oneiromancer
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I mostly use DROD on my laptop, which doesn't have a NumPad, so I can definitely adjust and remap the keys. Not all games are so understanding, unfortunately.

Game on,

____________________________
"He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder." -- Tad Williams

Maurog
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Call me conservative, but I like it how there is both a numpad and a regular direction key set on my keyboard. You can't really play DROD or roguelikes and stuff like that without a numpad. On the other hand I'd hate to use numpad where there are only 4 directions. The only keys I'd like to see gone from my keyboard are the special windows function keys (I have two of them that simulate clicking the START menu in windows, and one which simulates a rightclick... really annoying when you press them by mistake).

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Paint the sky in crimson red!

ErikH2000
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Numlocks aren't just useful to DROD and games--try entering a column of numbers in Excel without a numpad and suddenly your productivity is cut in half. I'd never buy a computer keyboard without a pad, unless it was a laptop. Even if number-crunching isn't your thing, eventually it will come up somewhere. A keyboard without the pad should be called "Junior Funtime Playpretend Keyboard".

Now, we really could remove the pause/break key. And scroll lock--anybody still using that?

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

Banjooie
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What do those buttons even /do/?

Also, Scroll Lock in certain games I play is the screenshot button, so.

ErikH2000
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Banjooie wrote:
What do those buttons even /do/?

Pause/break used to pause and break while certain programs ran. Like if you ran a program in a debugger, you could use that. I vaguely remember using it with some old version of Turbo C (or was it Borland C?). Also I think QBASIC used it. This is all back in the pre-Windows days. Oh, the nostalgia is setting in.

Scroll lock? I can't remember exactly what that did.

Also, Scroll Lock in certain games I play is the screenshot button, so.

Are you sure it isn't the "Print Screen" button that is right next to "Scroll Lock"? That takes screen shots too. Oh! Anybody remember when Print Screen actually sent a screenshot directly to the printer? That just sounds idiotic to me now. I think you had to hit ctrl-printscreen to put the shot in the clipboard.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

bandit1200
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ErikH2000 wrote:

Banjooie wrote:
What do those buttons even /do/?

Pause/break used to pause and break while certain programs ran. Like if you ran a program in a debugger, you could use that. I vaguely remember using it with some old version of Turbo C (or was it Borland C?). Also I think QBASIC used it. This is all back in the pre-Windows days. Oh, the nostalgia is setting in.

Scroll lock? I can't remember exactly what that did.
-Erik

pause/break would also stop/start a text file scrolling in DOS.

Scroll lock worked with the arrow keys and would allow you to scroll a text file without moving the cursor. Apparently it still works in some spreadsheets.

Talking of nostalgia, my first experience of DOS was with a software PC emulator on an Atari ST in the 80's. I then installed a hardware emulator, which was faster and had more memory than my first PC, bought a couple of years later..

Mattcrampy
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I use pause/break, usually when I'm programming (when I was programming). And I often use Scroll Lock in games when I need a toggle.

A trend I've seen around that I really like is a separate wireless number pad. Mum has one with her laptop - it came with her mouse.

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larrymurk
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I use a small keyboard w/ no numpad. Luckily DROD allows you to customize the keys.

b0rsuk
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Stay away from my numlock. It's painful to type lots of numbers without it.

Not to mention extra bind space for fps games... Team messages and all.
Roguelikes and DROD aren't so bad, either.
Lots of games use Pause key for - suprise - pausing it !!
-------------

I won't use my money to vote on a keyboard without numpad. But I could use a keyboard without windows keys. They make ctrl/alt harder to hit. I hate that.

____________________________

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Bombadil
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What about releasing a DROD USB keyboard with a numpad (1-9), 0 to undo (I have it there so it's more handy) and Q, W and R? ^^

When I play DROD in my sisters laptop it's a pain playing with the letters keys...

Radiant
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Control-break (just as control-C) aborts about 50% of all DOS programs and games. That's pretty much irrelevant these days. 'pause' doesn't actually do much per se but can be caught by any application (both old and new) and sometimes actually pauses a game, although this is relatively rare, and Escape, P and control-P are more common. Scroll lock? Never seen its use. Print screen prints the screen (duh) or captures it in windows. I don't have a clue what SysRq does. Come to think of it I rarely use the three windows keys either, and used to consider them gravely annoying but I got used to them now, mostly.


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= Radiant =

Oneiromancer
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The Windows key that brings up the Start menu gets a lot of use from me. I use it when playing DROD at work, to quickly minimize the game (I have to play fullscreen since my laptop is only 1024x768). I use it at home when playing pretty much any fullscreen game on my computer, to minimize it to look something up online, chat with somebody, etc. Sometimes it gets in the way...I've died a few times because of accidentally hitting it instead of Control or Alt...but in general I get good use out of it. I also prefer using that to minimize a fullscreen game over Alt-Tab.

Game on,

____________________________
"He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder." -- Tad Williams

Maurog
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My computer is not powerful at all and when I'm in some "heavy" program (like WoW) is really sucks to accidently press the windows start key. I go "oh sh..." as the operating system desperately tries to relocate system resources back to the desktop (and this probably involves getting stuff from the threshold file back to memory, as it can take about half a minute). And then again when I get back to the program - the conjured resources are sucked back like a genie into its bottle, and after a moment of confusion normal operation hopefully resumes. And all this over one wrong button? Sheesh.

____________________________
Slay the living! Raise the dead!
Paint the sky in crimson red!

Oneiromancer
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Lol...yeah, that killed me a few times in EQ...fortunately whenever it happened in a group it was never at a vital time. I've upgraded my RAM since then, and with WoW it minimizes pretty fast, and comes back quite fast too. It takes a long time to load a browser at first, but after that it's pretty quick. Guild Wars is extremely fast, but then again it has a minimize button built into it...that's a game which has its resources expertly allocated.

Game on,

____________________________
"He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder." -- Tad Williams

Doom
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I use pause/break key sometimes as the pause key in some games (It's strange but I use it about as often as P in SubTerra. I've never used scroll break.

I used to play DROD windowed with a 1024x768 resolution. (It's possible if you hide the title bar above screen. Windows key helped to check other things on the background more easily. When playing in full screen, there's always a small delay when pressing it. I prefer windows key over alt+tab too.

I'm using 1152x864 now and it makes things a little easier.

Django
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I've been playing with computers since the 60's, so I've used quite a few keyboard designs. I STILL miss having the ten PF keys in two columns on the left side of the board. And I've never found a NEED for most of the duplicated keys they've shoved in between the standard keys and the numpad. Get rid of them and more than enough room would be saved to restore the function keys to the left side where they belong. Yeah, right.

____________________________
Happy trails,
- Django

Ander
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This is incidental to the discussion at hand, but when I first downloaded DROD:AE in 2003, I immediately mapped "swing clockwise" to Number Pad Enter and "swing counterclockwise" to Number Pad Zero.

It is impossible to do this in DROD:JTRH. I was sad, and had to give up my one-handed playstyle.

trick
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I like all my keys.

Scroll lock can be used to pause terminal output so I can scroll with shift+pageup/pagedown without worrying about new output messing things up.

SysRQ is nice for those rare occasions when the system completely freezes and there's no way out -- SysRQ S(ync) U(nmount) (re)B(oot) can be used to do a safe reboot.

I've got the Win-keys remapped as extra modifier keys, so I can use them for moving windows and for desktop-wide shortcuts without interfering with any programs' shortcuts.

I haven't used the right-click key much, but it comes in handy if you're busy writing something, need a right-click menu, and can't spare the energy to reach for the mouse .

Pause/Break is also less used, but I've used it a bit, mostly to temporarily stop output (scroll lock only stops the output, pause stops the outputter).

- Gerry

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[Last edited by trick at 07-15-2005 12:10 PM]

Mattcrampy
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Yeah, that's right... Linux uses scroll lock and pause, and SysRQ too.

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Zmann
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Ander wrote:
This is incidental to the discussion at hand, but when I first downloaded DROD:AE in 2003, I immediately mapped "swing clockwise" to Number Pad Enter and "swing counterclockwise" to Number Pad Zero.

It is impossible to do this in DROD:JTRH. I was sad, and had to give up my one-handed playstyle.

Woah. Now that's just cool. Sounds like something I would do. I'm surprised I didn't think of it. One handed game are so awesome.

acrobat
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Sounds like some folks need one of these.

ESk
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For my part I've pretty much always used a laptop so the numpad seems a little bit odd to me. Never thought of it providing an advantage for entering numbers... I'll have to try it sometime.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

I just deleted the second portion of this post and moved it to its own thread/poll. I didn't want to diver the topic of conersation here too much.

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[Last edited by ESk at 07-19-2005 08:55 PM : Hindsight]

Oneiromancer
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I use the default laptop settings on my laptop. The only remapping I do on my home computer is to put Undo on the - key on the numberpad, so that it's a quick reach away, just like on the laptop layout.

I'm right-handed too, but as I grew up on computer games that had you move with the arrow keys on the right side of the keyboard...that preference just naturally caught on. The only FPS games I really played much were the original ones, Wolfenstein - Doom - Heretic - Quake, which were also generally mapped to the arrow keys and keys nearby. Using WASD was never hard, but it depended on what other keys were being used for that particular game.

Game on,

____________________________
"He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder." -- Tad Williams

jamie
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ErikH2000 wrote:
Scroll lock? I can't remember exactly what that did.

It stopped people pinching your scrolls, silly!

Anyway, Gerry touched on the same reasons I use those keys (on FreeBSD! ) but generally keys are just keys that can be redifined.. I.E. When I'm in x-windows, I have scroll-lock remapped to run the 'skippy' task manager. http://thegraveyard.org/skippy.php


____________________________
#f3i2g# Disclaimer: I'm Welsh, left-handed, and stupid. #f3i2g#

Syntax
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In addition to all the above:

Scroll lock is still used by excel (2002 at least). When pressed, and when using the arrow keys, the window will scroll but the selected cell will remain selected. Useful to snap back to where you were. Similar to mouse wheel in word, and then snap back with an arrow press but in excel, it's on the y and x axis.

Pause/Break is actually more powerful than Ctrl C when in an IDE such as (DOS) Borland C. Ctrl C would attempt to kill the running process. Ctrl Break would kill the IDE and return you to DOS (bye bye any unsaved changes but better than rebooting).
Pause itself was useful when 486 dx2s + (pre ME) came out and DOS/Windows boot screen would be loaded before the monitor could display all the himem, emm386, tsr loads etc... I still use as the other day my PC would reboot just before it reached the XP login, but just *after* displaying a 80x32 style DOS screen telling me what the matter was. Took a few attempts at pausing at the right time

Finally, Print Scrn is great, especially in a MMWIE (Massive MultiWorker Indoor Environment) where screen-shots are required. As Eric mentioned, Ctrl Prnt Scrn will capure the desktop, but ALt Prnt Scrn will only capture the active window.

ErikH2000
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Syntax wrote:
Finally, Print Scrn is great, especially in a MMWIE (Massive MultiWorker Indoor Environment) where screen-shots are required. As Eric mentioned, Ctrl Prnt Scrn will capure the desktop, but ALt Prnt Scrn will only capture the active window.

Don't print screen and ctrl-print screen do exactly the same thing? In other words, copy the full screen to the clipboard. I remember long ago pressing print screen and the screenshot actually going to a printer, but nowadays, it seems this is no longer the case. I've got a functioning printer hooked up (in fact, 3 functioning printers) but it doesn't send anything to the printer when I hit print screen.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

Syntax
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Wow... you're right!
There are hundreds of testers in the UK who press Ctrl Print Scrn in order to open tickets with meaningful scrnshots... or maybe it's a myth.

In any case, you've dispelled it

[I still stick with my Alt Print Scrn just copying the active window which is more useful to the coder -> I don't need to see that they're on playboy.net (for example) to fix the bug ]

Anyways Eric, and I've been meaning to ask... when we having lunch ?



[EDIT]

Oh, and while we're on the topic. Print Scrn did definitely used to print to printer (funny that), but that was first created by GEM in 83. They did the whole desktop Win-95-style first, convincing hardware manufacturers to build the keyboard (*hardware*) that the *software* expected (if only it was still that way round)... and then went bust...

I had a point.



[EDIT]

CVS conflict

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[Last edited by Syntax at 07-22-2005 11:55 PM]

ErikH2000
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Syntax wrote:
In any case, you've dispelled it

Cool! I didn't know about about the alt-printscreen. I have spent a lot of time cropping screenshots, so that's actually really useful.

Anyways Eric, and I've been meaning to ask... when we having lunch ?

Whah? Do you live in Seattle?

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

Syntax
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Well....

... no.

But, every time (rarely) when I shut down my PC, and hence have to close down JtRH you appear there shaking my hand, saying I've been good (bravely ignoring the scarab) and offering lunch so I thought I'd be the first (I assume) to take you up on it...

The London/Seattle thing might be a problem though