I recently bought a laptop that has a canadian multilingual keyboard. I've had to jump through some hoops to get Vista x64 to stop changing the layout and all the keys work as expected in all my programs. Except for BZ2. I find that some of the keys dont work at all from within bz2. This includes the tilde key, equals/plus key, left bracket/brace, and quote key.
AFAIK, the layout itself is not hugely different than a normal keyboard:
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I've tried playing around with my keyboard layout settings, and the few of them I tried havent worked fixed the problem -- which happens in both 1.2 and 1.3pb4a
Anyone have ideas?
They probably use different scancodes. Normally windows can auto convert the scancodes (and there is a key profile editor on the Microsoft site to make that easy to create a new one), but most games read the keycodes (hardware level) and not the scancodes (software level) so they can properly listen to each key (like each Shift key individually, instead of both as one and so forth). Fixing it would probably be just as simple as editing the BZ2 keymap file to use your keycodes instead of standard ASCII keycodes. The complicated fix (but would fix it in all of your games) would be to create a Keyboard Hook Driver (Windows XP and higher only) to convert the hardware keycodes to more usual hardware keycodes.
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BZ2 seems to talk to the OS to get the keyboard scancodes, at least on some level. Some of the KB layouts (in the windows i8n settings) i've tried have elicited different responses when I try to type into bz2, such as having the c with the little hook at the bottom of it show up as well as other non-english characters appearing when I type certain keys.
I know in 1.3 in gameprefs.ini there's a section at bottom that lists keyboard key stuff...any ideas there?
best way to get around it would be plugging in an external keyboard wouldnt it?
i went for a laptop with a full keyboard, i dont know if missing the numpad etc effects the way programs/drivers read it?