This week, I focused on bringing keymapper support to two more engines: Buried and Access. Both engines came with their own set of challenges
Buried
The Buried engine had an unusual approach to input: it handled most keypresses on key release rather than on key press.
In terms of actual key replacement, there wasn’t much heavy lifting to do. However, the real challenge—like in some of the previous engines—was figuring out when to activate or deactivate keymaps. Buried has different contexts where certain keymaps should be enabled or ignored, and tracing that logic took the majority of my time this week.
Once I understood those transitions, hooking up the rest of the keymapper functionality was fairly smooth.
Access
Access was easier to work with in comparison, but it did come with one major twist: it used function keys (like F1, F2, etc.) to change the current active verb in the game.
The function responsible for switching verbs didn’t rely on keycodes—it used internal numeric codes corresponding to different verbs. I couldn’t just update that function to use actions instead, because it was used in other parts of the engine where those codes were passed directly.
To solve this, I came up with a workaround: I mapped keymapper actions to these verb codes by ensuring the actions were written in a specific order, and then calculated the correct internal code by subtracting a default base. It’s not the cleanest solution, but it worked without requiring intrusive changes to the engine’s logic.
Wrap-Up
This week, I:
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Implemented keymapper support for Buried and Access
Next week, I’ll continue expanding support to more engines—each one bringing its own surprises.