Liquid War 6: User interface

2.8 User interface

2.8.1 A reduced set of keys

Liquid War 6 can be controlled using a reduced set of keys. This is to make the game more portable and allow possible ports to platforms where a full keyboard is not available. Depending on the graphics backend, exact mapping might change, they should hopefully be obvious and intuitive.

Those keys are:

up : the arrow up key
down : the down arrow key
left : the left arrow key
right : the right arrow key
enter : the enter / return key
esc : the escape key
ctrl : the control key
alt : the alt / meta key
pgup : the page up key
pgdown : the page down key

Basically,

2.8.2 Combining mouse, keyboard and joysticks

It’s also possible to control the game with the mouse only, or with a joystick. By default the interface will trap all events and respond on any of these possible devices.

Keyboard	Mouse	Joystick	Menu action	In-game
`up`	mouse pointer	stick	previous menu item	move cursor up
`down`	mouse pointer	stick	next menu item	move cursor down
`left`	mouse pointer	stick	change menu item value	move cursor left
`right`	mouse pointer	stick	change menu item value	move cursor right
`enter`	left-click	button A	validate menu	validate chat line
`esc`	right-click	button B	back to previous menu	quit game
`ctrl`	right-click or double-click on any button	button C	N/A	fire
`alt`	middle-click or triple-click on any button	button D	N/A	alternate fire
`pgup`	wheel up	button E	previous menu item	zoom in
`pgdown`	wheel down	button F	next menu item	zoom out

A final word about joystick buttons: there’s no such thing as standard joystick buttons, some will come with A,B,C,D, others will have A,B,start,select,L,R, there’s no way to know. By default, the game will use the buttons with the lowest indexes (returned by your driver) for the most usefull functions. Validate menu entries is the most usefull action, zooming in and out the one you can live without.

2.8.3 Quit with F10

There’s also an (almost) hardcoded shortcut which will quit the game immediately, or at least as quickly as possible, without any prompt or warning.

It is the F10 key.

Think of this feature as the procastinator’s “whoops, here comes my boss!!!” emergency function.