Someone Explain All of This

posted on march 25, 2004, tag: gaming

Yesterday I picked up Halo for the Mac. I own the PC version, but I got tired of plugging the Cinema Display into the converter just to play a game. It's especially annoying because you can't swap the display out while the Mac is on (since it gets power from the Mac), so you have to shut down, then unplug. It's time consuming—even if my Mac only takes 32 seconds to start back up—and I don't like having to get under my desk multiple times just to play a game then go back to normal computing. Anyway. Halo for the Mac.

I installed the game and launched it, and was shocked to find when attempting to change bindings that I couldn't assign actions to any of the action keys on the keyboard (Shift, Control, etcetera). Since I've been a PC gamer for many, many years now, I have developed a very good system for myself of using the keyboard and mouse, and that includes a very specific binding system. I use the same keys in almost all shooters because almost all have very similar command sets. In the PC version of Halo I was able to go about my business as usual, but in the Mac version I got no response when trying to assign reload to the right shift key. I tried assigning crouch to the right control key... no dice.

Now I'm confused. The Unreal Tournament 2004 beta allowed me to bind commands to these keys, so it's not an OS X thing. It seems to just be a Halo thing. Why would Macsoft do this? It doesn't make sense. Perhaps Mac FPS players are just used to the fact that walk forward is W, etcetera, etcetera, and they don't mind. I, however, do. I should be able to bind any command to any key on the keyboard.

It's also worth noting that Halo does not take over the system when it's running, which is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's great, because Halo runs exactly like another application and can be hidden, switched out of, and such, allowing you to play Halo and still receive IMs if you wish or anything of the like. OS X is so well done that I can actually use Expose and show the desktop while Halo is playing to check the time and then bring the app back into focus without a performance hit. At the same time, though, this means that when assigning keys on the keyboard that are assigned to other global system functions I get a conflict. For instance: by default, Halo binds the F1 key to show scores, but I have that assigned to an Expose function. So when Halo is running and I push F1, instead of Halo capturing the key press and just showing me scores, it shows scores and Expose also fires. This is very annoying.

Maybe the conflict problem is an OS X thing, but I don't think it is. I think an application can trap key presses and deal with them without having to send them to the system. Maybe I'm wrong. It should be noted that Windows has this problem too, but only with the Windows key on the keyboard. Then again, that's really the only global key in Windows (other than Alt+Tab, which works as well). I thought it was just Expose at first (maybe it was running in a layer above the application), but I found that using a Synergy function key also had this effect. Consider this my open letter to MacSoft. I might be the only bastard with this problem, but that's not going to keep me from complaining.

I also noticed rather cruddy visual performance from time to time, but apparently that's just because I was playing Halo in letterbox format (which matches the shape of the Cinema Display) and I needed to be playing in a 4:3 ratio (with black bands on the sides). This is something that definitely needs to be fixed. What's the point of having a widescreen display if you can't use a quarter of it? I'm willing to look past this, however, if I can actually the play the game—but the binding issues stated above are making that very difficult.

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