EPT[G] TheCore - Advanced Keyboard Layout - Page 365
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Mutaller
United States1051 Posts
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ThyLastPenguin
United Kingdom101 Posts
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YoTcA
Germany151 Posts
Also to clarify: If the hotkeys are not working correcty and you go into the hotkey setup ingame, do they show up correctly as Alt+Control+P (as you are using AltGr which is recognized as Alt+Control) etc. ? Or are they unassigned or something? And is there any message about hotkeys getting unbound, when you swap the camera hotkeys? If so, you could try to delete both bindings before switching them and check, if there is still a message of unbound hotkeys, which would mean that there is some kind of conflicting hotkey in the file. An other thing that helps most of the time: select the "Standard" hotkey layout from the dropdown menu and then the "TheCore" layout afterwards. This reloads the layout and gets rid of most errors that sometimes occur when the games does not load the hotkey file correctly or messes them up. | ||
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ThyLastPenguin
United Kingdom101 Posts
On December 13 2014 02:03 YoTcA wrote: Just an idea: Is it possible that the hotkey file is read only for some reason? This would lead to all changes beeing discarded when closing the game. Also to clarify: If the hotkeys are not working correcty and you go into the hotkey setup ingame, do they show up correctly as Alt+Control+P (as you are using AltGr which is recognized as Alt+Control) etc. ? Or are they unassigned or something? And is there any message about hotkeys getting unbound, when you swap the camera hotkeys? If so, you could try to delete both bindings before switching them and check, if there is still a message of unbound hotkeys, which would mean that there is some kind of conflicting hotkey in the file. An other thing that helps most of the time: select the "Standard" hotkey layout from the dropdown menu and then the "TheCore" layout afterwards. This reloads the layout and gets rid of most errors that sometimes occur when the games does not load the hotkey file correctly or messes them up. Not read only; when I reassign the hotkeys (swapping camera hotkey 1 with 2) there's nothing unbound. Although I just tried then and now camera hotkey using AltGr+P and Shift+P to assign and recall just doesn't work at all. Doesn't matter if it's camera hotkey 1 or 2 =/ EDIT: After some testing I found that it's just using AltGr+P to assign a camera hotkey doesn't work. No idea why but as I generally only set it once at the start of a game I've just bound it to Q. | ||
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Defenestrator
400 Posts
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shxdow
1 Post
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Mutaller
United States1051 Posts
On December 13 2014 21:12 shxdow wrote: I have a problem: I have an italian keyboard layout (laptop) and I don't know which file I'm supposed to download.Also the link in the FAQ is broken...Can anyone help me? Also,if I play with my right hand on the mouse,what's the point in using the right part of the keyboard? I haven't tried it yet but it looks much more uncomfortable than it would be to just use the left side. Do you have an external keyboard? Using the core without a tilt will be really difficult. Downloads should be Race (ZTP) Dominate Hand (RL) Size of hand (SML). If you don't have an external keyboard I would recommend the core lite! | ||
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YoTcA
Germany151 Posts
On December 13 2014 05:45 ThyLastPenguin wrote: Not read only; when I reassign the hotkeys (swapping camera hotkey 1 with 2) there's nothing unbound. Although I just tried then and now camera hotkey using AltGr+P and Shift+P to assign and recall just doesn't work at all. Doesn't matter if it's camera hotkey 1 or 2 =/ EDIT: After some testing I found that it's just using AltGr+P to assign a camera hotkey doesn't work. No idea why but as I generally only set it once at the start of a game I've just bound it to Q. Sounds like a conflict with an other program. Are you running any other program in the background that uses global hotkeys? Sometimes media players or mouse/keyboard software uses such hotkeys. Or it could be teamspeak or software like that. I once used AltGr+P to mute my sound in teamspeak. I do not remember, if I chose it myself or it was set by default. You could try to close all those programms before starting sc2. Maybe it helps. | ||
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ThyLastPenguin
United Kingdom101 Posts
On December 14 2014 19:10 YoTcA wrote: Sounds like a conflict with an other program. Are you running any other program in the background that uses global hotkeys? Sometimes media players or mouse/keyboard software uses such hotkeys. Or it could be teamspeak or software like that. I once used AltGr+P to mute my sound in teamspeak. I do not remember, if I chose it myself or it was set by default. You could try to close all those programms before starting sc2. Maybe it helps. Anddd you are definitely a smarter person than me. Pu.ush uses Ctrl+Alt P to enable and disable it. Here I was wondering why I kept getting pop-ups mentioning that it had been disabled/enabled every time I tabbed out of SC2. Thanks! | ||
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drKobalt
19 Posts
While I understand the driving principles, I have a few questions/comments regarding the design. 1. The control group mapping seems great and logical, but I am a bit lost regarding the mapping for the structure buildings. Some of the chosen keys for buildings do not feel right. Buildings are not as common actions as micro tasks, CG selection, or unity production, therefore I feel their mapping should be dependent only on ease of access ranked by structure usage. More common structures should have easier to reach keys, as key combinations, when it comes to building structures, don't seem to be relevant. For example, I am confused as to why the cannon has the easiest to reach key (middle finger in home position) while a gateway requires the ring finger to go down to the lower key row. 2. Is there any information regarding the key scores? Are these subjective statistical values or reached through some value assignment rules or measured in some way? 3. As factors considered I find mention of key/finger repetition and splits but it seems to me that the slowest finger motion is pressing a key that is not under the current finger position, i.e., moving the finger to another key. Therefore the slowest task is pressing different consecutive keys with the same finger, but pressing the same key with the same finger is not as bad. Am I under the right track interpreting TheCore2? Why are the building mappings not in accordance to the ease of access? | ||
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YoTcA
Germany151 Posts
1. On the spread sheet (link) you can see on line 66 the ‘BB priority’ (Build Basic priority). As you already mentioned, this takes into account finger repetition, when pressing the build basic key and the building’s key afterwards. Therefore the order is not consistent with the key score of the building’s key. You can see that we actually gave Gateways a higher priority (2) than Photon Cannons (4). So they are (at least in theory) easier and quicker to build. Why is this? First and most important thing: we have 2 Build Basic keys to avoid finger repetition. So basically you always want to start with the middle finger’s bb key, if the building you want to warp in is bound to the pinky and vice versa. Secondly, we can only put one of those Build Basic bindings on the home row, because the other home row ability key is taken by the Attack command. Now you are asking why, is the combo O-M for the Gateway considerd better than M-O for the Photon Cannon. The reason is, when you start with the Build Basic command on the home row, you can press Build Basic right away and during this key press have some time to move your finger down to M to select the Gateway. If you on the other hand start with the Build Basic command on M, your other finger has to wait for your pinky to travel down to M before you can press O to build a Photon Cannon. So in general you should be able to build a Gateway quicker than a Photon Canon. And btw, the most frequent building (Pylon) is the only building that uses 2 home row keys, and thus should be the most easy to build structure. 2. Hm, there once was a spread sheet that reflected how key scores are calculated, but I do not find it atm. There were scores for the distance a finger needs to travel to reach a certain key. There were also additionaly penalties for horizontal movement and for the need to move your whole hand to reach the key. Or when your finger cross like when pressing the U key with the ring finger. So the key scores are calculated by rules, but those rules are kind of arbitrary. So far we are not able to put a fix number on how bad it is to move your finger 2 rows instead of 1. So we just picked a number that felt right. 3. This is kind of true. If you only have to press 1 key, it is certainly better to avoid any finger traveling. But if you press that key twice it takes some time to release the key and press it again. If you compare the speed you can press OP and OO, you will find that it is possible to press OP faster. This is also related to the example above using O-M and M-O, where one finger can travel while the other finger presses a key. If you want to double press M, your finger has to travel to M first, and then you can start to press it twice. When starting with pressing O, your other finger can travel to M during this key press and now only has to press M once. Overall this should take less time, as the time to travel to M should be equal, but you get around pressing it twice. But again, we do not have found a way to make the difference measurable with strict numbers. So far we are working with rules that seem reasonable to us. As a small side note: We put select larva on most of the morph unit keys in the Zerg layout, to allow building units by holding down that key. So it is basically possible to double click that key to train 1 unit. I have tried that for a while, but so far it feels quicker to press one of the home row keys to select larva und press the unit key with the other finger. | ||
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Mutaller
United States1051 Posts
CG # Use 1 Macro 1 Hatcheries 2 Army 1 3 Army 2 4 Army 3 5 Harass 1 6 Spell 1 7 Harass 2 8 Macro 2 Queen + Upgrades 9 Spell 2 10 Other But this confuses me. CGs that should be different macro 2 can be anything, ideally bad Macro 1 Army 1 Spell 1 > Harass 1> Harass 2 > Spell 2 Army 1 Army 2 and/or 3 Harass 1 different than army Harass 1 Harass 2 Harass 2 same as army Army 1 Harass 1 or 2 At least one of army 2 and 3 different than army 1. Spell 2 different than army 1 (not so important) | ||
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YoTcA
Germany151 Posts
These rules try to avoid finger repetition whenever possible. They also give an insight in the priority we gave the various CG uses (Spell 1 > Harass 1> Harass 2 > Spell 2 ) If you only want to use TheCore they should not bother you at all  .@JaK: Do you think it is usefull to create a development version of the spread sheets and an 'I want to use TheCore and look up the bindigs'-spread sheet? There is so much additional info on the sheets, that help with development, but are confusing to the 'casual' user. I would suggest to copy the tables to a new google docs file, so it only contains 8 sheets (2 for each race) and make both files (the casual and the development version) accessible via a link in the OP. So people can decide wether they want to get some background info, or just check out TheCore. And with only the tables in the casual version, one can simply copy paste the tables from the development sheet once in a while to update the casual sheet (preferably when a new version of TheCore is released ). | ||
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JaKaTaKSc2
United States2787 Posts
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drKobalt
19 Posts
I coded an application to measure actual times for pressing different key combinations. I will post the results soon. If you guys are interested, I could generalize the application and deploy it to my web-server so that we can gather data from different volunteers. This can be done for all possible key pairs to determine key scores from real chronometric data. I can provide the data gathering software and statistical analysis. BTW, regarding the addition of a simpler spreadsheet for non devs, it is possible to link two google spreadsheets, so that the "casual" version pulls the data from the "dev" sheet. That way you don't need to do updates. =ImportRange(spreadsheet_key,sheet!range)  | ||
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YoTcA
Germany151 Posts
The application of yours sounds nice. I would love to have some real data to calculate the keyscore. Although I do not know excactly how to make this test realistic. Normally you have your fingers on the home row and wait for some visual or acustic input that triggers an action, making you press finger. This should lead to different times than knowing before hand which keys to press. One might position ones hand differently to make pressing those keys easier and thus falsening the results. We would need some test environment that prevents such behaviour. And thanks a lot for the ImportRange command. I knew you could reference cell ranges across sheets within the same document, but was unaware of the fact that you can even import them cross document. This makes it a lot easier. @JaK: With ImportRange there should be no problem to keep the sheet up to date. Would you like to create the sheet and invite me to edit it, so you are the owner of all TheCore spread sheets? | ||
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JaKaTaKSc2
United States2787 Posts
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drKobalt
19 Posts
Regarding chronometrics of finger movement: Isolation of response time is a common problem in cognitive science and there are some strategies to at least minimize third variables. We just want to use it in reverse (we want to get at the finger motion, not at the cognitive response time). In the chronometrics application: The fingers start in the home row and wait for a cue to press a given key combination. The cue is aided with a countdown to improve readiness. Key combinations are randomly presented to prevent the subject from positioning the fingers in a way as to aid the pressing of a particular combination. In addition, it is possible to measure reaction time (cognitive reflex or time it takes for the cue stimuli to get processed, for the brain to send the order to press the keys and for the electrical potential to travel through the nerves). One way is to measure the timings for pressing the same key twice. The reaction time can be then computed by simple subtraction. Once the reaction time is obtained, it can also be subtracted from the other finger combination tests to isolate finger motion chronometrics. Also for key combinations that start with a home key (or with the same key), only delta times from the first press to the second one, matter at all. To obtain data regarding the speed of many possible key combinations, random key requests can be made and then, with the sufficient sample pool, we can extract fastest "jumps". Finally, we don't really need absolute data, but relative data (to sort out the fastest combinations) making the task even simpler than outlined. Even with relative data we can get a quantitative comparison of how faster TheCore is vs standard key assignments. Nonetheless, absolute data is accessible by following the strategies mentioned above. | ||
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YoTcA
Germany151 Posts
By measuring the time it takes a person to press a key on the homerow, we can find the 'reaction time' threshold. Later we can subtract this value from every measured key combination to find the actual time it takes the person to press the key without the personal reaction time. Or we can simply compare the key combinations and find the relatively best which should lead to the same result. I do not know what kind of program you have, and how customizable it is. But I would love to give people the option to select which version of TheCore they are using (if any) to find out if muscle memory affects the ‘key press time’ of certain key combinations. | ||
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drKobalt
19 Posts
I wrote the application from scratch in c# so it runs in Windows for the moment, but I can convert it to something that can be deployed on the web (javascript or some such). All you mention is possible, we just need to feed the program the key combinations we want to try and those will be randomly given to the subject. Of course a public deployment will take a bit more effort since we need to link it to a database to save the results. Here are some preeliminary results (I am using PLS so I had to convert the keys to xRM): Trials: 85 Key Pairs Tested: oo, ol, o0,o9,ou,oj,oh,om Image shows median values (not average). ![[image loading]](http://mind-research.com/Dec20-2014-FingerChronometrics-1.jpg) Worth noting is that the slowest for me is om. and oo is actually pretty good. | ||
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