Keyboard deadkeys make vehicle menu unusable

[Tharn]

Game version:
dev 7022
Operating system:
Win 8.1 x64
Tiles or curses:
Tiles
Mods active:

Expected behavior

When hitting ^ using vehicle controls, the vehicle control menu should open.

Actual behavior

Hitting ^ does nothing. Hitting it again causes the control menu to briefly flicker up, then disappear again. This is in line with how deadkeys work. Note that deadkeys used to work in Cata, so this is a regression.

Steps to reproduce the behavior

Have a German keyboard layout, or any layout that has ^ as a dead key.

[BevapDin]

Note that deadkeys used to work in Cata,

When? What version used to work?

[Tharn]

I can confirm it still worked in version 6826.

It may have been necessary to press ^ twice, but the menu did not kill itself at least.

[nshcat]

I have a german keyboard, and I can confirm that switching to a deadkey-enabled layout causes this issue to appear with the current git version.

[Epictyphlosion]

I think one of the problems is that the game might not support (or at least not fully support) non-US keyboards. Though I'm not sure how this could be fixed

[Mecares]

A work around could be to simply make pressing the ^-Key a second time not close the vehicle menu, because the current problem seems to be that the first keypress is only processed once the next key is pressed which in case of pressing again the ^-key results in opening and instantly closing the menu.

It would of course only fix the symptom nof solve the underlying problem.

[mount2010]

in case you didn't know you can also change the keybind temporarily via esc - keybinds

[Inglonias]

I'm interested in this because it feels like this should be an easy fix. After all, I'm sure this isn't the first game to have this problem. That said, my Google-fu is failing me. I'm not seeing any easy fixes based on my Google searches, and I'm not going to lie: I don't understand how Cataclysm captures keyboard events in general.

[mlangsdorf]

So I forced my keyboard to be in German "dead-key acute" mode (please excuse typos as I'm not used to this layout) and couldn't control the car via shift-6 (aka ^). I rebound the control vehicles key to ' (aka shift-backslash) and could control the car normally.

Is this really a blocker issue?

[Inglonias]

I mean, the cheaty solution is to rebind the default key to access the vehicle menu (bonus points if we can detect problematic keyboard layouts when we do!), but the underlying issue here is "The game doesn't like dead key inputs".

It's entirely up to Kevin whether or not we should drop this issue. As I said further up, this seems like it should be easy enough to solve, but hell if I know how.

[kevingranade]

If you can rebind around it it's definitely not a release blocker.