Skill keys vs. positional keys

[Simon]

Hi folks,

[The Lix keyboard layout] is for people like you, not like me.
-- GigaLem

But once you make it second nature, SC2 feels smoother, snappier than ever before. Welcome to the world of enhanced control.
-- JaK (Starcraft 2 hotkey layout designer) about an advanced SC2 keyboard layout

We've had a lamenting discussion in IRC 2 days ago, and then in Lix in-game chat last night. Giga doesn't like the Lix hotkey system. Some definitions:

Skill keys: This is what Lix and Clones have. For each skill, you can map a key of your choice to it. That key will always select that skill.

Positional keys: This is what L2 and Neolemmix have, and L++ (= old Lix) had it until 2010. For each skill button on the screen, you have a key. These keys are arranged similarly to the on-screen buttons, in a row or grid. The key will therefore select different skills on each level. You can't remap them in any of those games, but remapping doesn't belong in this definition.

Matching keys: This is what L1 and old Lemmix have. It satisfies both definitions above: F3 is always the first key, and always climber.

I consider skill keys by far the superior solution. A modern game must use skill keys. Here is a ton of reasons:

• Muscle memory. You don't have to look at the skillbar. Each key is the same skill, always. That makes you faster.
  
• Comfort. You don't have to move the hand, you map skills to left-hand typing letters. If you mouse with the left hand, you map them all over to the right hand. That makes you faster.
  
• Ergonomic rolling motions. You want common composed actions as a smooth finger roll, like walker-jumper. The Lix default layout is not optimal for this, but the Lix layout can be amended (<-- link to topic). That makes you faster and removes human errors.
  
• Directional select. This must be in reach at all times!
  
• Extra surrounding keys. You can have pause on space, reload or fast-forward on the number row, ..., all quick to reach.
  
• The strong players all like speed/ergonomy-maximizing layouts, in both Lix and Clones. And Starcraft 2, see initial quote of this topic. And Quake, and, and, and...
  

What are the drawbacks of skill keys?

• It takes longer to learn.
  

About this drawback, I agree with the linked Starcraft article:

[Our custom layout] does thousands of actions, and every common action, faster than standard or grid [= positional/matching keys], giving you more actions per minute. It minimizes strain, increasing endurance. It is not what you are used to. It gives you the edge. It’s time for better mechanics.

The time has come to choose between what is right, and what is easy.

[...] It greatly depends on your natural ability to adapt to change, but players often report between the range of 30-100 games [each takes 20 minutes on average] for a basic understanding and feel of the layout and 100-200 games for a complete understanding and feel of the layout.

And that's for a game which has about 5 to 10 times more keys to learn than Lix. Learning the Lix layout is faster than learning SC2 layouts.

Your choice of hotkeys is printed on the on-screen buttons, to help you learn it.

Yes, learning a new layout makes you play worse at first. Nobody cares. :-) I've learned a different keyboard layout and ate 1 to 2 months of sucking at typing. I've remapped and relearned in Lix and Clones several times, and took the temporal suckage.

geoo likes skill keys so much that he hates Lemmix's default, unremappable keybinds. He has remapped them with an external program to match his Lix layout.

To compare, what happens with positional keys? Giga suggested the F1 through F12 for the 12 skill buttons. Maybe it's faster to understand at first.

Then, you will end up distracting yourself from the game by looking at the skillbar all the time. You must look at your hand while you move it in position, but looking at the hand shouldn't happen at all. You will never have more than 3 or 4 keys in easy reach. While you can do rolls, by setting the hand up for them before they happen, they will never feel nice!

<SimonN> anyway, he knows what he wants, but he doesn't understand what it would bring him
<SimonN> I know that he might be slightly faster than now, but can never have the good advantages of the clustered layout, and I'll have to implement it and support it as a user option
<NaOH> shh, pat pat
* NaOH ruffles your hair with her bunny paws

Making Lix keys matched?

That requires to arrange the on-screen buttons in a cluster similar to the keyboard keys. Probably not feasible, even with a higher resolution.

Making more skill keys (we have 12 at any one time, but there are more skills in the game than 12) doesn't solve the problem too well, when they're all aligned in a row. There is no good set of keys all in a long row.

A clustered on-screen display of the buttons is possible with a higher resolution, but it would look a little unwieldy. Also, a row of on-screen buttons is best for the mouse: Each button is at the edge of the screen, where the mouse cursor can't overshoot, making the buttons easy to hit.

More data from new users

When Proxima tried Lix for the first time, he wanted keys to move the skill selection left/right. This is also a positional system, and therefore slower than skill keys. Proxima, what is your current opionion on all this after using the game for a longer time?

NaOH's brother has tried the game once. He wanted a matching keyboard layout immediately.

Who has additional experience as/from a new user?

-- Simon

[namida]

Why not support both and make it a user option?

[Simon]

The benefit over mouse-only is negligible, but it will bloat the option dialog. Options should be reserved for what can be reasonably desired.

Learning 2 or 3 hotkeys for common skills in handy positions -- that is already superior to the linear row of hotkeys.

I don't want to dismiss the user option completely, so I'm eager for other newbie opinions.

-- Simon

[Proxima]

 

Making more skill keys (we have 12 at any one time, but there are more skills in the game than 12) doesn't solve the problem too well, when they're all aligned in a row. There is no good set of keys all in a long row.

My Lix layout is two rows (Z/A to M/J)   

When Proxima tried Lix for the first time, he wanted keys to move the skill selection left/right. This is also a positional system, and therefore slower than skill keys. Proxima, what is your current opinion on all this after using the game for a longer time?

Skill keys are essential for multiplayer, where wrong-key mistakes can be fatal. A positional-key system will lead to too much time spent recalling which key is the correct one for a given skill in the particular level. Left/right keys don't work either for multiplayer because they may require several keypresses to reach a skill (and it would be easy to hit once too many or too few).

However, from the hypothetical point of view of a player interested only in the single-player side, the advantage of skill keys doesn't really outweigh the difficulty of learning them. Most of the time, you don't need to assign different skills in quick succession, and when you do, you will likely be pausing anyway. Having left/right keys is a convenience to avoid having to move the mouse back and forth between the playing area and the skill bar, which is a considerable gain over having no keyboard controls, or skill keys that you haven't fully internalised yet.

It's true that playing a lot of multiplayer will certainly lead to internalisation, but playing a lot of single-player probably won't. So I would still want left/right controls available as an option for players who are entirely or primarily single-player oriented.

[Nepster]

However, from the hypothetical point of view of a player interested only in the single-player side, the advantage of skill keys doesn't really outweigh the difficulty of learning them.

From the very real point of view of a player interested only in single-player, still keys do outweigh the difficulty of learning them (at least for the more common skills). Not really because you are faster, but because otherwise...

...you will end up distracting yourself from the game by looking at the skillbar all the time.

One more reason against adding the option of positional keys:
I feel that it is easier to learn still keys from the scratch, than changing from positional to still keys once you are used to the first ones. So while positional keys might make the start easier for new players, it might be counter-productive on the long run.

A few impressions from someone, who was used to L1/Lemmix before starting on other Lemmings clones:
When I first played Lix, I immediately restored the L1/Lemmix hotkeys F- for the old skills and moved the others to convenient places. As I mostly use Lemmix, they are still there.
On the other hand the positional keys of NeoLemmix still continue to confuse me: Most of my mistakes in NeoLemmix come from pressing F7 and then stoning my lemmings .

[ccexplore]

Then, you will end up distracting yourself from the game by looking at the skillbar all the time. You must look at your hand while you move it in position, but looking at the hand shouldn't happen at all.

While I certainly do not advocate a positional system (the Lemmings 1/Lemmix system works IMHO primarily because it is matching, not merely positional), I think you greatly underestimated the power of muscle memory.  I have never needed to look at my hand/keyboard when playing Lemmings 1/Lemmix with the traditional F1-F12, as long as I'm on a keyboard I've been used to.  I'll grant you that's not necessarily the case for other people.

Skill keys will of course still be superior especially with multiplayer.  As Simon said, they will "feel nice"-er to your hands then matching/positional, once you've adapted.  You need the ability for multiplayer to have certain skills allocated to your fingers for efficiency based on typical skill-usage patterns.

The benefit over mouse-only is negligible, but it will bloat the option dialog. Options should be reserved for what can be reasonably desired.

While I'm not strongly for or against having an option, I have to say that the option window is already bloated enough as-is.  I know there are at least 2-3 times where I asked or complained here about something in Lix that turned out to have an option, but located in an unintuitive/unexpected (for me anyone) place in Options.  In that sense, having one more option probably isn't making things any worse already, plus this option likely has a more natural location than some of the other ones I failed to discover myself in the past.  (To be fair, organizing settings is generally difficult, and having many settings make it harder to test thoroughly.  These are well-known arguments in software development in general against having too many user settings.)

I imagine one checkbox is all you needed, an option to map F1-F12 for positional purposes on top of having the skill keys.  (Or you could consider Proxima's arrow-key proposal--it's even less efficient but then you can perhaps simply add two new entries for it on the keymapping options page.)  There may be need for a warning popup if there are already other things currently keymapped to one of F1-F12.  There's no need to allow remapping of F1-F12 positional keys given it's positional plus being a newbie option.

[Simon]

Adding Z/X as two remappable keybinds, or adding a single checkbox for fixed F1-F12 positional keys -- both of those are feasible and non-bloating, yes. When I was scared of options bloat, I had imagined first a switch for skill/positional, and depending on that, different buttons to remap everything.

I still feel with Nepster, how not giving this steers the user in the correct direction of learning a few direct skill keys, even if not all. The positional keys are a skippable mental indirection.

Historically, Lix had the positional keys, and then I saw the skill-based left-hand keys in Clones. Those were immediately obvious to me how they had to be better in any perceivable way. They're even easier to learn -- our problem exists solely with people who have played Lemmings extensively and build up the false/indirect association.

So, before making an option, I'd ask Giga to use Nepster's layout, i.e., F3-F10 for L1 skills, and others around that.

The disadvantages here are absence of directional force without moving the hand, and hand moving in general.

ccx, what options have you tried to look for and not found immediately? The graphics category strangely comprises hardware settings and view settings, which are not comprised in user thinking.

F1-through-F12-muscle memory: That is suprising, yes. Do you have F-keys the same size as normal typing letter keys, and separated in groups of four?

-- Simon

[ccexplore]

ccx, what options have you tried to look for and not found immediately? The graphics category strangely comprises hardware settings and view settings, which are not comprised in user thinking.

It looks like the only post I could find is this one, so maybe it's not as much a problem as I remember.  Granted, aside from keymapping I rarely need to visit any of the Options categories (a good thing of course) to begin with.  The Hotkeys category there is mostly fine once you recognize the Editor hotkeys are in the "Editor" category rather than the "Hotkeys" category.

The Graphics category actually doesn't look too bad, though I suppose one can argue maybe the "Menu Color X" settings should be in the "Menu" category instead?

Yeah, this is not easy.

F1-through-F12-muscle memory: That is suprising, yes. Do you have F-keys the same size as normal typing letter keys, and separated in groups of four?

Yes, good point actually now I think of it; accuracy would probably suffer greatly without the grouping.  Also it's been a while since I last played on Lemmix, in thinking back I suspect I probably still end up often glancing at the skills toolbar (while paused) to ensure I did hit the correct key (and adjust accordingly if not, per the luxury of singleplayer pausing).  Certainly not pretending this is a good system compare to skill hotkeys.

It does make one wonder how the F1-F12 system came about when they did the original Lemmings.  It's true that back in the pre-GUI days of computing the function keys are probably used a lot more in many programs, and so maybe it makes more sense based on that alone.  On the other hand, I'm sure they also have hotkey combinations not based off of function keys in many programs back in the day, so skill hotkeys shouldn't be all that foreign.  Did a skill-based system simply escape DMA's mind back then, or did they consciously choose the F1-F12 system over other alternatives based on either their own testing or beta user feedback?  Too bad Mike's no longer around to ask.

[namida]

In all honesty, the DOS keyboard controls didn't make much sense. Another example would be moving the cursor, which if I remember correctly used Q/A for up/down, but O/P for left/right.

[Proxima]

Very common in 80s games. QAOP are the default controls in Chuckie Egg, for instance. Though I grew up primarily playing Repton, which does the same but the other way round: ZX for left/right, @? for up/down. In games that have no other controls except movement and one other (such as "jump" or "fire"), these are good systems as both hands are used, and having the horizontal and vertical controls separated takes away the risk of hitting the wrong key by mistake. The PC re-release of Repton uses the arrow keys, which had become normal in the intervening years, but naturally I immediately switched back to ZX@? and I've set all the current speed records in the Repton series with those controls   

[namida]

Ah, okay, I wasn't aware of that. Outside of Lemmings, I've only ever encountered arrow keys or WASD.

[Simon]

Positional keys are going into the game, as a single yes/no option.

The option will disable all normal skill keys, and instead map F1 through F12 to however the level has ordered skills. These keys cannot be remapped. Whoever wants them in a row, they probably want them on the F-keys anyway. And F-keys tend to be the same in every keyboard layout.

This prints a warning in the options dialogue, how these keys would be slower.


Edit 2016: The optional positional keys stayed in for about 4 months. Since August 2015, Lix displays all skills in a long row of 14. Remappable fixed-skill keys offer the same benefit now: If you believe that one long row of 14 is best, map your keys in one long row.

-- Simon