Setting Up The Keyboard

Caveat

The key assignments are for Quake 3:Arena, but the basic principles hold true for any first person shooter.

Your configuration should be specific to the way you play. Everyone has their favorite set up and if anyone tells you that there is one best way to set up your controls, they're plain wrong. Copying another player's set up is a good way to get started, but you need to tweak it until it's right for you.

Principles

• Comfortability. If you're like many people who play Quake for hours at a time, your configuration should allow you to comfortably rest your fingers on a small set of keys and minimize the stretching and reaching you have to do. This will let you play more effectively for a longer period of time.
• Key Efficiency. Ultimately, you want to have the smallest number of keys, which allows you access to all key weapons, movements, and other often-used commands. If you have too many keys or your scripts are too complex, you will begin losing track of what each key does. Additionally it's easy to accidentally hit the wrong button during a critical moment. I tend to use a lot of scripts in my autoexec to improve the flexibility of my configuration and reduce the number of keys I have to manage.
• Effectiveness. Last but not least, the configuration needs to work for you. What works for the top ranked player might be totally ineffective for you. This requires a little bit of thought on your part. As you play, think about what commands you are always using, which keys you always have to stretch for, and how keys might be more naturally arranged.

Key Assignment

Zone	Description	Commonly Bound Commands
Primary	Consists of 7-9 keys and all mouse buttons (my mouse only has 3 keys and the wheel). These should be the commands you need when you're in an intense life and death firefight. I can play an entire game without my fingers ever leaving these keys/buttons, which minimizes the amount of moving and reaching I have to do.	Attack Forward/Backward Strafe Left/Right Favorite Weapons Grapple Weapprev/Weapnext Jump
Secondary	Consists of the keys surrounding the Primary Zone. Getting to these keys require a minor stretch but are still easy to get to without removing most of your fingers from the Primary Zone. You should feel comfortable getting to these keys during the course of an active shoot out.	Scores Crouch Zoom Other weapons Button 2 and 3 (use) Drop Rune (Coliseum only)
Tertiary	Tertiary keys require a major stretch to access and could require removing your hand from the Primary zone or the mouse. For this reason, the Tertiary Zone should contain non self-preservation critical keys.	Chat messages (this may differ if playing team games) Demo controls All other miscellaneous functions FPS counter or Timer toggles

If you're a beginner, launch Quake and go to the Main Menu. Select Controls and you will find all the commands nicely laid out, waiting for you to assign keys. If you are beyond that and already have an autoexec, edit from there. I do all of my config editing in my autoexec using Notepad.

Start off with figuring out which keys you want to use for movement. Once you have that figured out, assign the surrounding keys. Remember, as you move away from the Primary Zone, the commands and functions should be increasingly less important.

When you think you are finished, fire up a Skirmish game and play against a couple of bots to get a feel for the new config. Does it feel OK? Are you still stretching to get to a key? Did you forget something? If you need to tweak some more, get right back in and tweak away until your satisfied or too tired to care.

Here's what my keyboard layout looks like:

Maintenance

Adapting Your Configuration To New Games or Mods

It’s an easy process but you have to understand the differences between your standard game, whatever you play most often, and your new game or mod. I’ll use Urban Terror Beta 2.0 as a case example of how my basic Quake 3 config was adapted:

1. Jumping is a key skill in Q3:A. You learn to strafe-jump, bunny-hop, and are constantly leaping from spot to spot. Because it is such a critical action, +moveup occupies a key spot in my primary zone, the SPACE key. However, in Urban Terror, I don’t jump very often. Each jump takes away from stamina and there are not as many occasions to jump around. Instead, there is a sprint function, which gives me a crucial burst of speed to cross danger areas like roads. In this case, +moveup gets moved to my tertiary zone and sprint gets the SPACE key.

2. Urban Terror limits the number of weapons you can carry to 5. I have almost all of these weapons bound to 2 keys (primary – secondary, and sidearm – grenade). Because I have all of my weapons accessible through 2 keys, weapprev and weapnext are less important. Instead, I value the ability to rapidly scroll through zoom settings since I’m partial to weapons with scopes. Therefore I’ve moved weapprev and weapnext from my primary zone, the MOUSEWHEEL and replaced them with zoom in and zoom out.

3. Urban Terror requires a separate key assignment to open doors and reload your weapons, pretty key activities in my book. Each of these gets assigned to the primary zone, reload in place of screenshot on MOUSE2 and open doors in place of the grapple. Bandaging yourself and your teammates is also a fairly common task, so bandages goes to the secondary zone.

4. In a team game, general chatting with the field is probably less important then staying in touch with your buddies. I swapped the positions of messagemode (general chat) and messagemode2 (team only). In fact, I added a whole new section to my terror.cfg file assigning team communications binds to the keypad.

Each game or mod has it’s own set of keys that will be more of less important (buy commands in counterstrike, dodge and alternate fire mode in Unreal Tournament, etc.). Get into the game and really understand what is important in your existing configuration and what needs to be important in order to do well in the new game. Once you have a first pass complete, fire up a game and give it a go. I tweaked my Urban Terror configuration for an evening before I got it just how I want it.

The reason you will want to save all of your settings in an autoexec file is that Quake will not overwrite the autoexec.cfg while it will overwrite q3config.cfg every time you start the game. Additionally, q3config.cfg does not save scripts.

Caveat

1. Are you always reaching to get at critical keys?
2. Do you store all of your custom bindings and settings in Q3config.cfg?
3. Do you lose track of what each key does during games?
4. When you edit your autoexec.cfg, do you have a difficult time finding the line you want to edit?
5. Do you have a lot of keys that pretty much do the same thing?

A few people have asked to review their autoexec files and I've found some common themes:

• Using the arrow keys for movement. This is usually a holdover from old DOOM days, but some people persist in using the arrow keys for movement because that is what they learned on. For starters, you might consider moving your movement keys to either a WASD/ESDF configuration or use the keypad - depending on whether you're left or right handed. The arrow keys are almost always an inefficient choice because, on most keyboards, there are no other keys that are contiguous around them. This means, that in order to execute any other command other than move, you are forced to stretch.

• Multiple and redundant binds. There are several reasons that multiple keys can end up bound to the same or similar functions. Sometimes you delete scripts and forget to reassign the keys, other times, you might have a button bound to show the FPS counter and another counter to remove it. Start off by cleaning up your autoexec and removing inactive binds. You might be surprised at how much extra space you find. Next, see if there are scripts or toggles that can help you consolidate keys. I use a lot of two-weapon toggles and other keys bound to turn the timer or FPS counter on and off. There isn't space here to talk about scripts, but you can visit The Bind or my scripting tutorial for a quick tutorial.

• No organization to the autoexec. Often times, I see people who have used q3config.cfg as the basis for their autoexec but haven't bothered to reorganize or group similar functions. My Quake 2 config is like this. In the case of key assignments, q3config lists them alphabetically. This may help you identify which keys are free, but if you are trying to bind movement keys, you'll have to hunt all over the place. Likewise, when I bind weapons, I want to look at key assignments as a group because 1) I want to make sure I haven't left anything out and 2) I want to see where the keys are in relation to one another. Do whatever works best for you, but grouping keys somewhat will make editing your autoexec a little easier.

• Leaving weapons assigned to the default number keys. 1-0 are the default assignments for weapons but you probably want to consolidate your weapon assignments to 1-6 and one or two closer to your movement keys. 7-0 are probably too far away from your Primary Zone to reach effectively, especially since some of the more powerful weapons are numbered higher. Group them into a tighter group and pick one or two of your favorite weapons and move them where you can most easily access them.

Remember, have fun and just play the game!