For games, the mnemonic meaning of keys are unlikely to be used because gamers prefer an ergonomic placement of their fingers according to the physical position for essential commands. But this won't apply to control keys, as these commands should be single keystrokes and pressing two keys instead of one would be unpractical and would be a disavantage when playing.
That's why the four most common 4 direction keys A/D/S/W on a QWERTY layout will become Q/D/S/Z on a French AZERTY layout. Games that use logical key layouts based on QWERTY are almost unplayable if there's no interface to customize these 4 keys. So games preferably use the virtual keys instead for these commands, or will include builtin layouts adapted for AZERTY and QWERTZ-based layouts and still display the correct keycaps in the UI: games normally don't force the switch to another US layout, so they still need to use the logical layout, simply because they also need to allow users to input real text and not jsut gaming commands (for messaging, or for inputing custom players/objects created in the game itself, or to fill-in user profiles, or input a registration email or to perform online logon with the correct password), in which case they will also need to support characters entered with control keys (AltGr, Shift, Control...), or with a standard tactile panel on screen which will still display the common localized layouts. There are difficulties in games when some of their commands are mapped to something else than just basic Latin letters (including decimal digits : on a French AZERTY keyboard, the digits are composed by pressing Shift, or in ShiftLock mode (there's no CapsLock mode as this ShiftLock is also released when pressing Shift: just like on old French mechanical typewriters, pressing ShiftLock again did not release it, and this ShiftLock applied to all keys on the keyboard, including punctuation keys. On PC keyboards, ShiftLock does not apply to the numeric pad which has its separate NumLock, now largely redundant and that most users would like to disable completely each time there's a numeric pad separated from the directional pad, on these extended keyboards, NumLock is just a nuisance, notably on OS logon screen when Windows turns it off by default unless the BIOS locks it at boot time, and lot of BIOS don't do that or don't have the option to set it permanently). Le dim. 16 sept. 2018 à 14:18, Marcel Schneider via Unicode < unicode@unicode.org> a écrit : > On 15/09/18 15:36, Philippe Verdy wrote: > […] > > So yes all control keys are potentially localisable to work best with > the base layout anre remaining mnemonic; > > but the physical key position may be very different. > > An additional level of complexity is induced by ergonomics. so that most > non-Latin layouts may wish to stick > with QWERTY, and even ergonomic layouts in the footprints of August Dvorak > rather than Shai Coleman are > likely to offer variants with legacy Virtual Key mapping instead of > staying in congruency with graphics optimized > for text input. But again that is easier on Windows, where VKs are > remapped separately, than on Linux that > appears to use graphics throughout to process application shortcuts, and > only modifiers can be "preserved" for > further processing, no underlying letter map that AFAIU appears not to > exist on Linux. > > However, about keyboarding, that may be technically too detailed for this > List, so that I’ll step out of this thread > here. Please follow up in parallel thread on CLDR-users instead. > > https://unicode.org/pipermail/cldr-users/2018-September/000837.html > > Thanks, > > Marcel > > >
