Choosing good, non-conflicting keywords for the game

Question

PC keyboards were not designed for gaming, compromises were made to lower the price, so there are some problems. Most importantly, when you hold certain keys, some keys do not respond to pressing.

In my game there are two users on one PC controlling two characters in real time (i.e. without rotation). Problem instance: Player 1 holds Up and Left to go in this diagonal direction. Player 2 cannot go right (with "D"). Besides being just annoying, it can give an unfair advantage to a player who prefers to use the mistake as a hoax. Not fun :(

The main teams: shooting, walking left and right and jumping. Shooting is performed using LeftControl and RightControl, which do not conflict with anything, so consider only the navigation keys.

On my laptop, the most obvious keyboard shortcuts are:

• WAD and arrow keys do not work with Up + Left + S and Up + Left + D
• IJL and arrow keys fail using Down + Right + J (although Down is not technically used, the player often holds it anyway)
• The arrow and numpad keys fail using the Down + Left + NumpadLeft buttons
• all letter combos like WAD and IJL tend to work, but I don't like to leave unused arrows and collect user hands.

Is there a website that displays statistics of common supported keys on different keyboards to help me decide on defaults? (They are customizable, but it matters by default.) I seem to recall the corresponding site called keyboardssuck.com, but I cannot find it now.

How did you deal with this problem ? Just ignored it?

Does the problem depend on OS, API, mobo? Anything else? I think this only depends on the keyboard model, but you need to ask.

edit: Now I know what it's called: "rollover"

Answer 1

A better bet will probably allow the user to choose their own bindings.

Answer 2

This is a hardware implementation issue. For me, this problem presented itself depending on how the keyboard is connected internally.

It seemed to me that this is not so. At the same time, a certain combination of 4 keys worked perfectly on one computer (desktop computer) - another keyboard simply can recognize no more than 3 of them. (A laptop)

My guess is that you can rely on all the control keys (ctrl, alt, shift, windows, apple-keys) because they are probably connected to another "layer". But when it comes to “normal” keys, including cursor keys, numpad keys and the like, I would say that you can probably rely on 3 keys at the same time.