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Anyone/Company working on a new standard for keyboards supporting analogue keys at OS level? (self.hardware)

submitted 3 months ago by Grofit to c/[email protected]

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Keyboards have been around for over 40 years and since then not much has really changed in terms of the standard keyboard functionality at the driver/os level.

In the past decade we have seen quite a few keyboards coming out with analogue keys which is great but they are really sketchy to try and actually use for anything as it's not something an OS expects a keyboard to be doing so you need special 3rd party drivers/software which often don't get used in a truly analogue way anyway.

For example in a lot of games analogue directional sticks are the norm, so altering movement speed/sneaking based off the analogue amount is pretty normal, however when you get to PCs you just get keydown/keyup events so you can't process it in an analogue way.

So given we are seeing more keyboards coming out with this functionality at a lower price point is there any company/person/body trying to put together a standard that would allow for analogue key events at OS level or even DirectX (DirectInput) / OpenGl?

I imagine the answer is no, but wanted to ask incase anyone in the know had more info.

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[–] Grofit 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

As a steam user I would love to see that but unsure how they could do it without the keyboard vendors agreeing to a standard, or having some bespoke drivers/hardware stuff like they do for ps4/switch controllers etc.

Also I imagine steam input would just map let's say wsad to gamepad left axis, but some games will lose their mind if you try to use gamepad for movement but mouse/keyboard for other keys.

I appreciate there is limited benefit outside of gaming, maybe for media players to ffwd/rewind based off input amount etc.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

They could simply declare a standard and let the enthusiast community handle adding support for specific hardware. It might be a niche community, but that niche does self select for people willing to engage some. And presumably "this works on Steam" would be enough of a market mover for some manufacturers chasing that very small niche to support it.

You can't change what inputs games will take. They will emulate a joystick from mouse input, but I don't think it's great. But at the end of the day a game expecting binary inputs isn't ever going to work with analogue ones without very specific engine hacks.