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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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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This sounds like something that would be great for SteamInput to handle. I'm guessing it currently doesn't, but it has most of the bones it would take to handle mapping inputs that way.

[–] 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.