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[Supermercado]

Was reading some other forums and there was a thread about what keys you use to control games. There were some really funky configs posted. So... what's yours?

ESDF - forward, strafe left, back, strafe right
Spacebar - crouch (never liked spacebar for jumping)
Alt (but I've been using R in HL2 and I like it a lot; might change for all games) - reload
Mouse1 - primary fire
Mouse2 - jump
Left-side mouse button - secondary fire
Right-side mouse button - run/walk

I used to be arrow keys hardcore but once I changed to ESDF, I've never looked back. Someone at the other forums said that if you use WASD, there's absolutely no reason to not use ESDF and I agree 100%. There's no advantage at all to using WASD over ESDF. You get an extra column of keys (Q, A, Z) to use, don't have to bind Capslock, and the little bump on the F key is great for repositioning your fingers on the keyboard if you move them away for some reason.

So let's hear it. List out your configs and reasons why yours is the best. Let's start a big argument :-)

[Catfish]

Ok, took me forever to get back and post a ton, but I'm here

And my config originally came from Descent, so it was built on having space on both sides of my primary movement to do other things... as such, I have a really standard config:

ESDF
Spacebar - Jump
Ctrl - Crouch
Z - Use
M1 - Fire
M2- Alt
Shift - Walk

And in flight games, W and R are rolls, Q and Z are straight up and down

My only major drawback is the left column is generally dependent on my left pinkie, and I haven't gotten a mouse w/2390847902834702983472309874 buttons... once I have a mouse with that many buttons, I imagine jump will move over there and spacebar will become walk (cuz right now, walking and strafing left are a real bitch to do at the same time)...

So my config would be:

ESDF
Space - Walk
Mouse-something - Crouch
Mouse-something - Jump

[Supermercado]

Yeah, I love my config. And I never could understand the whole space bar to jump thing. It just never felt right.

Actually, for gaming, my mouse is the same as yours. My Logitech with all the buttons is hooked up to my laptop and my MS is hooked up to the desktop. It wasn't until recently that I was even able to use the Logitech in games... one of my buttons is bound to the start menu; that doesn't work too well in games. But there's a program called LogiGamer that lets you set application-specific buttons. So I go in and set my mouse buttons to be things like i, o, and p or something that isn't in the way of my normal config and then just bind i, o, and p to things in the game. Works great.

[Catfish]

That's a neet little trick... if I get the MX1K, I'll have to do that

[Supermercado]

Yeah. Although you may not need to. The may have the MX1000 drivers working correctly. I don't know that they ever got the mouse buttons on the MX500 functioning totally properly. Even the mouse buttons that weren't bound to the Start Menu didn't like being pushed in games. They didn't have the effect of dumping me to Windows - they just weren't available for binding. LogiGamer gets around that and it works wonderfully. But like I said, though, you may not even need it. I did get the MX500 shortly after it was first released...

[elmono311]

I don't know what config I use since I don't play FPS games a lot on my computer, but I usually use WASD. I haven't had any problems with that configuration so why change it?

[Supermercado]

Because it has no advantages at all over ESDF :-)

[jitspoe]

This thread seems more fitting for the gaming section, but I'll bite:

A - left
S - forward
D - right
F - jump
C - back
W and V - crouch (V holds)
E - use or similar
KP_ENTER - reload (can't fire while reloading anyway, so what's the use in using your left hand?)
MOUSE1 - fire
MOUSE2 - alt fire, or in paintball2, swap hands.

[Supermercado]

ASDC? That's interesting. Never heard of that config before. But it's still not the weirest I've seen. Brandon might win that one by using the right mouse button to move forward. Or maybe Schmidt who used something like DC for forward/back and FV for left/right. Very strange and unnatural, to me. I'm sticking with my trusty ESDF.

[coffeecup]

huh? 

[jitspoe]

Shmidt's sounds interesting, but it seems like it would cramp your hand.  I'll have to ask him about that.

[Supermercado]

He may not use it anymore. Maybe he thought it was too weird or something. I sure did, haha.

While you're talking to him, point him over here to the forums. Schmidt would be a good character to have around and I know he'd become a regular.

[Schmidt]

Let's see. I started with the number pad. 8546 for forward backward and turn left turn right, with 7 and 9 as the strafes. That was back in Marathon, before I discovered mouse aiming in Quake. That led to the arrow keys for forward/backward/strafe because, hey, they're arrows! Intuitive! But not an efficient use of desk space to slide my keyboard over to the left, and it cramped your wrist to have your left hand all the way over on the right side for the arrows. WASD was the natural next step, and then ESDF as Super points out because you get another row of keys.

I imagine that was similar to what most people went through, and then I went off the deep end and switched to ERDF. E/D = forward/backward, R/F = left/right. The logic was that just as you could never possibly be moving forward and backward at the same time, you could never possibly be moving left and right at the same time. So why keep two fingers busy on left and right when one finger could do all the strafing you needed? The psychological switch didn't take any longer than the times I would have to retrain myself between inverted and non-inverted mouse controls for games that didn't support whatever I was used to. The only real problem with the unorthodox setup was that through some combination of keyboard and OS factors I never nailed down, you couldn't always press that may buttons so close together at once before Windows would just start beeping at you. I think, for example, I had S as my crouch key, and my computer would start beeping if I was pressing SDF all at the same time (crouching and strafing back/right) or something like that.

Oh well. I'm back to WASD for the time being just because I don't play enough FPS any more to want to remap the keys in new games that come with WASD standard. At the moment, the only PC game I'm playing that uses a setup like that at all is City of Heros, and it's got so many keys mapped that it's not worth the hassle of trying to move any around.

[LostArtofRolando]

Ah City of Heroes! Definitely something i've been meaning to try out, though i usually never had the time nor the money... sadly, now i have the time, but still no money haha.

[jitspoe]

Hey, hey!  I got Schmidt posting! (takes that off the todo list;)).  I know what you mean about the key-combination thing.  It's actually a hardware limitation, I'm pretty sure.  There isn't one wire for each key.  Instead, it's like... combinations of connections that get encoded down to just a few connections.  If you've ever opened up a keyboard, you'd see that there are only a handful of wires that go into the little chip that interprets the signals.  I have the same key-combo problem on my laptop keyboard -- I can't press A, S, and F together, which is essential for strafe jumping, but other 3-key combinations work just fine, and that key combination works on other keyboards.