Action button labels, again

[comradekingu]

I    R

  O   N
!    Y

 

[Tenka]

Cool thing about using button labels that mean something (_wb_'s proposal) is that you can also type what they mean.  The special little character is for fitting in a button, if someone needs to refer to them on the forum later on (which I'm still not sure will come up very often) they can also call them insert delete pageup and pagedown, right?  That'd be exactly what the buttons do, and exactly what the buttons say, and they'd also have simple single character labels for game GUI instructions to indicate, and those labels would look enough like directions that nobody would have any problem knowing where they are on a cross.  It's easiest.

comradekingu though, come on, just using arrows is so boring that hardly anyone who likes games is going to feel happier with that.  And those are easier to confuse with d-pad directions, can you see that making fighting game combo directions confusing? "^-down->-<-right-right-<"

 

[ZXDunny]

comradekingu though, come on, just using arrows is so boring that hardly anyone who likes games is going to feel happier with that.  And those are easier to confuse with d-pad directions, can you see that making fighting game combo directions confusing? "^-down->-<-right-right-<"

As opposed, of course, to the same fighting game combo composed of left/right and various arrows with lines through them?

You're all bloody insane, the lot of you.

D.

 

[comradekingu]

^ ↓ > < → →   is the combo.

Spoiler

Arrows can be typed with altgr +u ↓ +i → +y ← and shift+altGr  +u ↑

Can you device something thats easier than that?

 

[Neelix]

As opposed, of course, to the same fighting game combo composed of left/right and various arrows with lines through them?

You're all bloody insane, the lot of you.

That's precisely why I'm not particularly enamoured with those particular symbols even though I do agree with the idea of putting representations of Home, End, PgUp, & PgDn, Ins & Del there. But again, I haven't seen a better set of symbols to represent them.

- Neelix

 

[ZXDunny]

As opposed, of course, to the same fighting game combo composed of left/right and various arrows with lines through them?

You're all bloody insane, the lot of you.

That's precisely why I'm not particularly enamoured with those particular symbols even though I do agree with the idea of putting representations of Home, End, PgUp, & PgDn, Ins & Del there. But again, I haven't seen a better set of symbols to represent them.

Well, the way I see it (and I do understand that people - especially the basement dwellers - are going to just hate this) is that there's a DPad. On the other side of the keyboard is this dominant-looking diamond of four buttons. Now, call me bonkers but I reckon that just shouts "Gaming!" to most folks. With the Pandora we didn't get PgUp/Dn/Home/End on there because that's where those functions should be - we got them because they were available. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I do believe they were labelled "ABXY".

I can't wait for all the posts full of weird unicode symbols, mostly because no bugger can type them unless they live in their Mother's basement. Everyone else wants those posts so we can copy/paste the symbols into our posts (and normal people can't type them in because they don't have a bloody clue what kind of finger gymnastics are going to be needed, especially if you bunch of bungling fools end up designing the keyboard). God help the game creators who have to ensure their games can reproduce Unicode characters, or we're going to be seeing a lot of blank boxes in text.

D.

 

[Tenka]

comradekingu though, come on, just using arrows is so boring that hardly anyone who likes games is going to feel happier with that.  And those are easier to confuse with d-pad directions, can you see that making fighting game combo directions confusing? "^-down->-<-right-right-<"

As opposed, of course, to the same fighting game combo composed of left/right and various arrows with lines through them?


You're all bloody insane, the lot of you.

Sorry, did you read the other half of my post?  And I thought I was repeating already understood stuff too.  We wouldn't have to type those symbols, those symbols represent what the buttons do, they mean Insert Delete Pageup Pagedown.  You can call them what they mean, or if someone prefers they can use the symbols in text, which yeah I think are easier to distinguish from d-pad directions than carrot-arrows.

 

[Nintendo]

What's the point of all this when ABXY will win in the final stage anyway?

 

[WizardStan]

What's the point of all this when ABXY will win in the final stage anyway?

Gotta argue about something.

 

[comradekingu]

Because if nobody bothered to find out what it was that threw people when they first saw the gp2x layout, we wouldnt know. Nor would we be able to device a system that fixes it.

Btw, i talked to ED and he said the buttonclusterbuttons will have the same material and engraving as the pandora. So no colours, unless you pinstripe it in yourself i suppose.

 

[SNESFAN]

So I went back through a whole bunch of old video and written reviews of the pandora looking for anyone complaining about the button layout.... guess how many complaints I found about them?

... not a single one

and there were some absolute retards that have reviewed this thing, some I question they had the intelligence to actually turn the thing on in the first place.

stick with the ABXY, add 1&2 for the 2 new buttons. Your just going to confuse people by trying not to confuse people.

 

[_wb_]

The Pandora ABXY only have a subtle engraving to label them, nothing very prominent. On the Pyra the labels will be backlit, just like the rest of the keyboard, and there will be two more.

So far, the main argument in favor of ABXY+2 seems to be the concern about discussing native Pyra fighter game combos on ascii-only discussion forums (i.e. not this one). Please allow me to 'do a Saber': I understand the problem, I just think it is not a very important one.

 

[_wb_]

So it is not acceptable to make newbies read about keyboard functions via first start booklet or first setup screen, maybe even a preinstalled background image detailling the controls?

That is better than nothing, but worse than having the buttons properly labeled.


Would you like to have a keyboard on your computer where Ctrl, Alt, Shift and one more are blank keys, and so is the Ins/Del/Home/End/PgUp/PgDn block? But you get a booklet and a wallpaper!

I'm not talking about having blanks, but easily typed and spoken letters. The symbols make ppl look up ASCII codes unless they want to call the buttons the "up-arrow" or "upper big button".

You're not labelling the buttons as clearly as on a keyboard. My keyboard says POS1, END, PgUp, PgDn. And I've never even seen the capital I and forward delete ones. <-- See? I'm already doing it.

Just make it easy to reference the buttons.

OK, let me put it another way:

Which keyboard would you prefer, this one: http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/9005c099d6c7c97a6c9b9e9292b0c1ea

or this one: http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/layouts/edcfaf40ef6b4f799f9d7bf4402d9e70

And then that's just a standard keyboard, where most people already know where to find every key. It gets a lot worse if the keys are not in a standard location.

Labeling those 10 buttons with Ins/Del/Home/End/PgUp/PgDn/Shift/Ctrl/Alt/Meta instead of the symbols would also be fine for me, but I'm not sure if there is enough room for that, and that looks even less appealing from the point of view of gaming.

 

[rygD]

You can't eliminate confusion and difficulty, so embrace it and go with solid black unmarked gaming buttons.

Or to help console gamers go with ABXY in the Nintendo orientation (and + and -)...I was going to say mark them in PS colors, but I guess that is out of the question.

Or do the keyboard function symbols to help for non-gaming.

Unless the final keyboard layout moves them I already know their functions and don't need to see it to remember (which is not the case with the shoulder buttons).  For gaming, the button markings will not help me since I will mostly be using emulators and such and the markings will be wrong sometimes anyway.  IDGAF still, but I really don't see a solution that works for everything.  We are probably going to get ABXY, or possibly their keyboard functions.

Feel free to continue arguing in circles.

 

[comradekingu]

Not eliminating it completely is not a good reason to avoid the issue. Albeit that being a better idea than BXYA.

So we dont know that ABXY in the nintendo orientation isnt protected. Besides, its not so much helping the native crowd so much as it is activly bad for the other camps. Its not possible to do anything meaningful about the buttonlayout on the pandora. Even so, it garnered a lot of interest in trying to improve it before it was made. And its the single most discussed topic now, in large part because of how terrible it is for international users.

This is grim. The BXYA layout is a  minor issue, most people forget about it just as fast as they forget there are actually labels on the buttons, assume its protected, but importantly it _never_ fails to annoy the first time you see it. I still remember that. And the sentiment that was brought up on launch about the gp2x or the pandora.

The people exposed to BXYA, aka gp2x layout  are a rare breed to begin with, and im thinking near 100% of them are used to SNES or sega-layout from before.

Who is the user that is more exposed to native gp2x/pandora gaming with BXYA than something else? Its a case of asking the consenting/conditioned audience, not consulting those who didnt get a pandora or answering the question of how many of them went in the shelf.

 

[Ziz]

TL;DR.

Z Y
A B
W X
still makes most sense for me.

 

[Nintendo]

I can't wait until the Pyra is finally finished and released, so I can use this thread as a comedy/joke reference.

 

[_jr_]

OTOH designing the PYRA according to the opinions of shield fans is probably not a win either.

 

[Nintendo]

I'm also a PlayStation fan.

 

[ZXDunny]

OTOH designing the PYRA according to the opinions of shield fans is probably not a win either.

Designing the Pyra based on the comments of a bunch of fanatical geeks that have no clue whatsoever about which they speak and have literally zero product design experience is probably not a win for anyone.

D.