Hi!

I just discovered PICO-8 and wanted to try some of the many great carts. But nearly all of them are unplayable because most games use <X> and <Z> as buttons. But X and Z are so far away on my keyboard layout that makes no sense. Please fix that, that is really bad usebility.

For most of us Z and X are right next to each other. What kind of keyboard are you using?

probably AZERTY

For most of us Z and X are right next to each other. What kind of keyboard are you using?

Z and X are the names for US keyboard layout, but for other layouts they should still be at the bottom-left of the keyboard. e.g. QX

You can also use C/V and N/M (or, again, the keys in the same position as US layout) if that helps.

For the Desktop versions, you can also choose any key mapping with KEYCONFIG.

Yet more reasons people should refer to ⓧ and ⓞ rather than the letter keys they're assigned to by default for them...

Except with X and O, I can apply the same argument with a QWERTY keyboard, they're on the opposite ends of this keyboard

In my case ( french azerty keyboard ) the default keys are w and x ( -> bottom-left ) on desktop version but it goes back to z and x on the web player.

Ahh, because Google Chrome is blocking Mozilla's attempts to update the keyboard input standards to have scancodes and keycodes instead of a bunch of totally arbitrary numbers which may or may not refer to specific keys depending on the operating system and browser returning them, right? And because of that, everything that wants maximum web compatibility (such as emscripten, presumably) still uses the old system, and there's probably nothing we can do about it.

For this specific case... I'm assuming zep would have to manually write some JavaScript to take input for the game using scancodes if they're available and falling back to the old "which" key input if not? And even then that'd only fix it for Firefox because Chrome always lags behind in standards. Web development is a right pain in the arse that way. It wasn't until very recently that Chrome accepted a CSS rule to scale images and web canvases up with pixelation rather than blurry linear scaling.

That's finally fixed? Now I don't need to tell people to download firefox to read Kid Radd!

And I said ⓧ and ⓞ, the buttons. Not X and O.

Yep. Exactly. As long as the archive you use has the correct CSS rules for it, anyway. It would've been useful for making pixel canvas games before WebGL was a thing, too...

keiya: ⓧ and ⓞ will still cause confusion among new players I think, as it's easy to misinterpret those as keys rather than as button symbols. And the cognitive dissonance of having ⓧ mapped to Z when X is mapped to ⓞ is pretty awkward.

① and ② might be clearer, because people may be familiar with games referring to joystick buttons 1 and 2, and are less likely to assume that those refer to the actual 1 and 2 keys.

Either way, the web player needs some documentation outside the frame about which keys are used for which buttons. Otherwise games that have to document their controls will just continue to use e.g. "press Z/X to start" even on platforms where there are no keys at all.

How about having a function BTNN(key) in the next version of the API which would return the name of the given key based on the keyboard mapping?

That wouldn't work given the consideration that the default mapping is both z and c for ① and x and v for ②

Which itself is also causing the problem of some games expecting you to use z and x and others are expecting you to use x and c to reverse the button order entirely. ...

Hmm ... Perhaps allow reconfiguration of A and B buttons by pressing ENTER Online.

=> CONTINUE
RESET CART
RECONFIG A & B

It can be done by anyone uploading a game with a bit of extra code, but in time it could be intrinsic to the OS.

Pretty sure "O button" = Z, and "X button" = X, though. Like the first and second keys. That's been my experience, at least.

Button 4/5 respectively.