"Kilrathi" Keyboard

Jumper

Rear Admiral
I'm in the market for a new keyboard; several friends suggested the "l33t" blank keys. But why have blank keys when I could do something fun instead?

I made this up using a Windows font version of the "Kilrathi" font from the WCP assets that someone posted back here a while back. From reading all the threads on the language, we just don't have enough information to make a "real" keyboard. I thought this captured the style of the WC3-WCP Kilrathi pretty well though. I carried the Base 8 numbers out into 8 and 9 (effectly 10 and 11 in the font provided), and spelled out several of the keys that didn't have symbols in the font (+ = 'PLU', - = 'MIN', * = 'MUL', / = 'DIV', etc).

WASD keyboards (http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/) makes keyboards with completely custom laser etched or engraved keycaps, so if I want to I can actually order this.
 

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Wow... why are the keyboards so expensive? I kinda understand the Keys themselves, but the rest?
 
Mechanical keyboards are expensive.... The very cheapest Monoprice model with Cherry switches is $60. Most "decent" models are around $100, Das Keyboard at $125...

With WASD you're paying for the customization, you get to pick both the keycap color and the legend for every key individually at no extra cost. Figure a half hour of an employees time to pick out the colors, laser, QA, and install the custom keycaps and it's easily $25 more than competing models with fixed configurations. Also they have to carry inventory in all those different colors, and maintain the laser machines to do the etching and engraving.... All at a US company, not somewhere in China.
 
And here is what it would look like with key colors.

Edit: Of course the file upload got messed up, fixed.
 

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Did you move and place letters from the old WCP assets or did someone actually make a font of them? I think the only Kilrathi font I have here is from the movie, so I might have missed that.

Are you going to get one made?! Be sure to post pictures!
 
The font actually came from a post here on the CIC, way back when - https://www.wcnews.com/chatzone/threads/kilrathi-hud-concepts.26091/page-2#post-376115

WASD seems to be out of parts to deliver keyboards at this point... I was able to pick up a model from another vendor that the WASD keycaps will work with for ~$100 so I'll be getting just the keycaps from WASD for ~$40.

Once I get my set I'll happily share the .svg file with anyone else who wants one... But I'm going to be selfish and be first!
 
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Yeah!
Great to see that my Kilrathi font is put to good use by someone! (I use it for my mod but I figured nobody else knew it existed even though I posted it)
Cool keyboard!

EDIT: I'm still working on my Kilrathi mod btw (although I admit that I am still stuck a bit), and still could use a bit of help, so if anyone is interested please send me a PM or something. :)
 
Lsxo2aJ.png


The keycaps are here! I ordered a keyboard from another company through a group buy on Massdrop - it came with 2 sets of factory keycaps that I should be able to resell to make some of the $$$ back and get the total cost down a bit.
 
This is so awesome!
I might even get such a keyboard myself...

Kilrathi FTW! For the Glory of Kilrah, the Emperor and the Empire!
 
And, the keyboard has arrived (a Ducky 9008G2 Pro) and the keys are mounted. I present...the only Kilrathi keyboard this side of the Vega Sector:

kS3gwpc.jpg


I missed the fact that this particular keyboard has 4 extra keys where the "lights" are on a normal keyboard. I can get 4 individual keys from WASD with more "Kilrathi" symbols on them, or just leave it as-is.

All in all this turned out really nicely.

The "white" keys are actually a beige off-white, which fits really nicely with the color schemes we saw for the Kilrathi with stone tablets, etc.
 
I missed the fact that this particular keyboard has 4 extra keys where the "lights" are on a normal keyboard. I can get 4 individual keys from WASD with more "Kilrathi" symbols on them, or just leave it as-is.

All in all this turned out really nicely.

The "white" keys are actually a beige off-white, which fits really nicely with the color schemes we saw for the Kilrathi with stone tablets, etc.

Well that color scheme makes sense for a Kilrathi computer keyboard. Bone-white keys would either be plastic (commoner), some kind of stone like marble (mid-range Noble or Lord), and actual hand-carved bone from an enemy (upper Noble/Lord, Clan Lord, Royalty, etc). Crimson Red or Blood Red keys would probably either be the same material only color-died, or if its a Royal or such, died with the actual blood of said slain enemy (probably with some kind of special chemical treatment to prevent discoloring).

Guessing the 4 extra keys are (based n appearance), the equivalent to START, STANDBY (pop-up menu with standby, logoff, shutdown options), MAIL, and HOME (nav to home-page when in browser, otherwise it would start/load up a browser) keys.

-- and per Aginor's request for font-help --

I used to have a program that let you design your own letters/numbers/symbols and then assign them to keyboard keys. The shareware version lets you save your work, but you have to pay to register the program if you want to convert your custom work into an actual font. I think it was a scale-able true-type font, though it did have options where you could design each letter for each font size (so you could put more detail in for a larger font-size, and specific versions for bold/italic since sometimes when you design only say a size-12 letter it often looks blurry when up-sized or missing-bits when down-sized -- cap B ends up looking like cap D, cap Q looks like cap O, lower e and lower c look alike, etc)

I'll see if I still have the program. It used one of those basic key-gens where you send the creator money and your name and he uses some formula to convert your name into a long serial number, and the program is old, so unless he made a newer version, you can probably google-up a keygen or patch if you want to pay (I paid for mine, cause it was fairly cheap money-wise.) Its a good program and you can load individual bmp/gif/jpg for eah letter or bitmap-draw each letter. Whole program was under a few MB too, unlike a few others (like the fancy bloated one that Corel offers, which requires you to drop at least $60 to buy one of their multi-program CDrom's that requires a huge "minimal" install of over 100 MB)
 
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