Number and arrow keys

[Nick]

Currently number keys are used in some circumstances as directions, arrow keys (ie the up, down, left, right arrows that are on most keyboards) are only ever used as directions, and keypad keys are usually mapped to numbers, regardless of whether NumLock is on or not. Can anyone give me a single good reason why the up, down, left, right keypad keys shouldn't be mapped to the arrows rather than numbers? I have at least one good reason why they should.

[Nick]

OK, I think I've answered my own question. I changed this because it was mysteriously causing crashes in WinXP. So it appears that I'm stuck with either broken menu behaviour or crashes. Or at least Windows users are - the change seems to work fine in SDL.
EDIT: Works fine in x11, too.

[Donald Jonker]

It's strange how inconsistent numpad behavior is between variants. In V, there are no crashes, menus work fine, but if you map a spellbook/rod/scroll/whatever to an even number (e.g., @m2), it won't work.

As you said, in O/FA it's either menus or action+dir not working.

In NPP and others (I believe Heng, for one) everything works - inscribing even numbers along with everything else.

In some variants, you can (shift) run only with numlock off, in some (I believe only in O/FA) it doesn't matter.

I wonder why this should be so.

[Nick]

There are two substantive issues, and one weird one.

1. .prf files, which translate actual keypresses into something the game understands. These will depend on operating system and potentially hardware, so there's lots of scope for them getting out of date or just wrong;
2. Overlap in use between arrow and number keys. This is embedded fairly deep in the code; it's mostly OK, but gives scope for coding errors. This has been particularly striking with the new menu UI.

These don't stop maintainers from getting it right, they just make it easier for them to make errors.

In fact, I think I have now got all the issues sorted in O110u/FA (in development, at least), except for the crash issues in windows. Changing pref-win.prf, which fixed the crashes, has mean that the keypad arrows are behaving like numbers, which messes with the menus. I am intending to have a go at debugging this in windows soon, so I can sort out what is causing the crashes and allow the menus to work properly.