Saturday, February 21, 2015

Keybindings - Using WASD in ActiveWorlds

I've been gaming quite a bit in my time away from ActiveWorlds, and on my return I found movement with the directional arrows rather unsatisfying.  Thanks to some help from GC and The Alphaworldian, I've got a new setup that I would like to share in case anyone has a similar problem.

You can access the "Keyboard Controls" window from the top menu bar.  Select Options > Configure Controls.  Here's mine, with WASD movement setup in the rightmost column:


Some notes:
  • "Move left/right" and "Sidestep" seem to do the same thing.
  • "Look up/down" are bound to middle mouse scroll up/down.  Toggle move mode is bound to middle mouse click.
  • You can bind two keys to the same action, so I've got old arrow movement and WASD movement both in place. My WASD movement is defined in the right column in the image above. 
  • With WASD movement, the "Quick chat message" button becomes more useful. I believe tab is the default binding for this -- you can use it to quickly set "focus" to the chat window after you've bound letters to other actions. 
  • I haven't had any luck binding the "Escape" key.  The Keyboard Controls dialog uses it to cancel actions, so it doesn't seem that it can be defined from here.
The only thing I'm really missing still is free camera movement with the right mouse click, reminiscent of World of Warcraft.  Using the middle mouse to look up/down has been the closest approximation I've found so far.