Hi,

I have a pretty simple but critical issue which shouldn't take long to solve, and it would be great if the next Skyrim update would address it. When I re-map my keyboard controls, the on-screen instructions in the main menu, tooltips, dialog boxes, and other pop-ups don't change to reflect my re-mapped layout. So for example the menu will still say "Tab to exit" even though I've remapped the exit key to ESC, so pressing tab does nothing anymore.

This is a pretty big deal for new players, because all of the on-screen instructions become misleading. My friend accidentally drank an entire barrel full of potions that he was trying to put into his inventory, because he was pressing the key shown on-screen. In most games, the hotkeys in the menus and dialog boxes are not hard-coded, but will actually re-map themselves along with the keys. I was very surprised to see that Skyrim didn't do this. I hope it will be fixed soon.

I'm new to these forums, so my apologies if this topic has been brought up before.

Thanks,

J

Yes, it's been brought up a few times but the topic usually drowns in grumbling about the UI's other violations of common mouse+keyboard usability principles, and common sense in general.

Some Bethesda poster said shortly after the game's release that the UI icons are entirely precomposed art assets and they can't make them change without having an icon for every possible key. So apparently drawing a key's name on top of a key-shaped icon is hard.

Personally, I think they should stop letting artists develop UIs with their fancy Flash middleware tools and go get a real programmer instead, doesn't even have to be a good one for something as basic as this.

really - it is a pretty basic screw-up

I see. Let's keep this thread clear of other grumblings then, because those will probably deserve their own thread.

That's very surprising about the art assets. First of all becuase those images are very small (smaller than a forum avatar, surely; a keyboard only has about 100 keys) and secondly because as you say, they could easily just use plain text instead of artwork. That would be fine enough for me, just as long as the correct instructions are being displayed. It doesn't seem like it should really be very difficult to code.

Standard keyboards have 104 keys, so you were pretty close . I agree, one of my biggest wishes as far as Skyrim bug-fixes go is a fix for hotkeys updating when you re-map them.

I don't consider this a bug considering that we all know that this is a console came that was ported over to the PC. They just didn't do a good job in this regard.

How I've dealt with the issue is to leave the hard coded interface keys at default and use AutoHotKey to assign them to an additional key. The interface doesn't lie to me and after one hour of playing the custom keys that I prefer to use are imbedded within my brain (it's not like we really need the UI to tell us what keys to use for common actions anyways). This method also removes the issues that others have when they customize their keys only to find out that they can't do certain things any longer.