Fully Customizable Controls

I really can't believe this request isn't already here...

Many of the key combos, and really the controls in general (besides the basic 'wasd') are quite awkward, at least for myself. I've edited a few of the key bindings in keys.ini, but really, I can't think of any game I've ever played (yes I just lumped SL in with "games" that didn't have 10 times the re-mappable key functionality of SL.

For as much micro-managing as SL can entail, and as much time as it consumes, it would be infinitely more convenient for individual people to be able to remap all of the controls to come out with the most efficient setup. If not globally for the entire client, it would be great to be able to save all of these key settings on a per resident basis.

And as long as this is merely a request, don't forget the mouse bindings and dual-key combinations!

Ehem ....

Far from the request not being "already here", it's been discussed countless times over the last 3+ years (and probably longer). The reason why you no longer see much mention of it here is because the forum's old timers have realized that manpower constraints don't allow LL to implement even a minuscule fraction of good feature suggestions, and that this isn't going to change. (And some feature advocates just got bored of waiting and left. )

On top of that, the client is now open sourced, so pure client-side changes like mapping of key and mouse controls could trivially harness the huge manpower resources of the open source community. The only problem with that at the moment is that LL hasn't made it easy to integrate community + Linden client code (their CMS is still closed to community updates), so community devs work in isolation on their own versions which rapidly go out of date with each new official release, instead of contributing to a single growing community client as a branch in the official CMS. Everyone is chasing taillights and waiting forever for LL to approve and merge their patches. I expect that there's plenty of good will ... but just not enough manpower inside LL, not by orders of magnitude.

In summary, don't hold your breath on such feature suggestions. A better bet would be to beat on the "Open your CMS" door, so that Linden and community builds can be generated side by side and released simultaneously. That's when you'll suddenly see the ranks of developers swell into hundreds and thousands. And then it shouldn't be long before you see your generic control mapping system appear.

Morg.