Only one keypress recognised at once in wc1 and wc2

Madman

Vice Admiral
Apologies if this should be in tech support really!

I'm having a wierd problem where only one keypress is recognised by a game at a time - it's present in both wing commander 1 and 2, but is more irritating in wc1.

Basically, in wing 1, if i'm firing and then start to angle the ship (pressing up for instance) and then press and hold fire, then the ship will fire once and continue moving but the guns will not fire again,

alternatively, if i hold fire (space) and tap up, then the ship will continuously act as if the up key was pressed while i hold down fire, if i press up again then the ship stops firing as above

if i hold up then press left then the ship moves diagonally in the same way and continues to do so until BOTH keys are released (releasing just one has no effect)

note the same is all true in secret missions 2, despite the newer executable

in wing 2, the arrow keys dont lock each other out, however they do lock out the fire key (space) - ie if moving i cant fire, and if firing and then start to move, the firing stops.

Also, afterburners in both games have the same effect as firing, and i can't do both together (ie it doesnt recognise both tab AND space simultaneously)

I've had this problem before on my old laptop - I just couldn't play the games on it. It's not an issue that appears in starcontrol 2 - suggesting that it is an issue with wc and not with either system or dosbox (the problem is present in dosbox 0.72-0.74). The problem isn't present in Armada so i'm stumped!
 
That's a known problem with the way the games handle the keyboard buffer. I don't recall, off the top of my head, if there's any way to work around it.
 
This was the official Origin response in regards to KS, but the issue is also reproducable with the DOS versions in DOSBox as well. A lot of people do get used to it, and I don't think there was a workaround.

The way that Kilrathi Saga handles the keyboard input may make flight with the keyboard difficult. We recommend that you fly using a joystick for the best overall performance.
 
As a keyboard player, I remember running into this issue. Although, from memory, I only had the problem in Kilrathi Saga, not DOS. That's actual DOS, by the way, not DOSbox. I haven't tried running WCs in DOSbox just yet.

And no, I didn't find a work-around. ): Which will be disappointing for me if I run into this problem with DOSbox.
 
I didnt play wc1 with keyboard and i played it after wc2 - which i did play with keyboard the first time round. it's less annoying in wc2, so maybe i just put up and shut up. But yeah, a workaround would be good :)

On a more random note, has anyone managed to get either of the wc1 home made campaigns to work? I was trying yesterday and kept being crashed out when starting the missions.
 
You want a challenge; Laptop touchpad.

Now THAT was fun. It took a lot to pull it off and I think I have the carple tunnel now to prove it :p
 
You want a challenge; Laptop touchpad.

Now THAT was fun. It took a lot to pull it off and I think I have the carple tunnel now to prove it :p

Damn :D

I figured, those touchpads actually could be much better for games if you would alter the logic by which it registers movement. The current method is fine for non-game applications, but for most games you'd rather have continuous movement in the direction your fingertip is from the center of the touchpad, and the greater the distance to the center, the faster the movement. What do you think?
 
Damn :D

I figured, those touchpads actually could be much better for games if you would alter the logic by which it registers movement. The current method is fine for non-game applications, but for most games you'd rather have continuous movement in the direction your fingertip is from the center of the touchpad, and the greater the distance to the center, the faster the movement. What do you think?

I tried that... increasing the speed of the cursor on the touchpad so that you could move greater distance with it sent the fighter into a spin, uncontrolable. Even just increasing it a little.
 
I think I didn't make very clear what I meant, I'll try to cook up some visual illustration of what I am proposing. I don't know if it is possible to do that software-wise with current notebook touchpads out-of-the-box.

In the meantime, maybe it's easier to understand if I put it this way: You try to map the touchpad like an analog joystick.
 
tis an intriguing idea, i'm not sure if you can get information on WHERE the pressure is being applied though, if you can then there's no reason it wouldn't work
 
As far as I know, the only place where a regular programmer can hook into what the touchpad does, is after it's converted into mouse data ( i.e. mouse cursor position and such ). In this way, mapping touchpad information to some sort of a virtual joystick is certainly possible, no doubt about that.
 
So a discussion in the "how to get all wc games working in dosbox" got me thinking, basically someone was using keyboard->xpadder->dosbox->wc to use his keyboard to emulate a gamepad

but dosbox has support to map keys to the joystick internally!

so i setup my joystick as so:

[joystick]
joysticktype=4axis
timed=true
autofire=true
swap34=false
buttonwrap=false

mapped the y+ to the up arrow, y- to down (for joystick 1) x- to left etc

and jobs a good one - i can now fire AND steer ;)

Note that i removed the mapping for my arrow keys to the arrow keys in dosbox, not sure what would happen if i left it mapped, but it can't be good! also if the timing was false then the joystick moved too quickly.
 
Back
Top