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[Freddybear]

Try holding a direction key and then press and release the Shift key a few times(to "accelerate" the movement).

[Toady One]

I'm not sure if that was directed at me, but like I said, none of these shift things are causing the problem for me.  I've tried them all, and they don't do it here.  Of course, they are causing problems for other people, but I have no way to test it.  At the same time, pressing, say, 8963 at roughly same time on my number pad will get a stuck direction about a third of the time for me, and pressing the stuck direction (possibly with shift) will always unstick it.  I don't know enough about how message loops and keyboards work to solve this problem, which is why I referred to the KQ source above.

[Tahin]

I have this problem in both XP and Wine/Ubuntu. Almost always, I can stop it by mashing on the direction it's stuck in and the shift button, but twice now that hasn't worked and I've had to restore from an old save to make it stop.
I've notice that if I hit shift first and then the direction, it works fine, but if I go the other way (which for some reason seems more natural to me) it gets stuck. As long as I remember to stop scrolling before I press or release the shift button, it works fine.

[Jaqie Fox]

Hardware issue. either the keyboard controller in your keyboard is dying, the keyboard cord is dying, the connections are faulty somewhere between the keyboard and the motherboard controller, the motherboard keyboard controller is dying, or a combination of the above.

I have seen this issue many times in my time as a computer technician. In a nutshell this is what happens:
Press a key. keyboard controller translates that into a "this key is pressed down" signal which is sent through the wires to the keyboard controller in the motherboard, which translates it again and is sent to the BIOS and/or operating system (DOS used bios for everything, newer OSes operate things directly bypassing BIOS).   Then you let go of the key. the process repeats, but something goes wrong with the key released code, either its not sent correctly, is garbled, is not recieved correctly, or something similar, and even though you released the key, the signal never got to the OS/BIOS.  cover the little output of a remote control and hit power... same sort of thing here.

Replace the keyboard, try a usb one (or ps/2 if your current one is usb), etc to track down your problem, but the problem is DEFINITELY in your hardware.  Ive even seen a really bad PC power supply causing this once.

[Sowelu]

quote:Originally posted by Jaqie Fox:
<STRONG>Replace the keyboard, try a usb one (or ps/2 if your current one is usb), etc to track down your problem, but the problem is DEFINITELY in your hardware.  Ive even seen a really bad PC power supply causing this once.</STRONG>

That's a very irresponsible thing to say.  Seeing as many different people can reproduce this bug (it's happened to me, too), I would very much hesitate to call it a hardware problem.  A hardware idiosyncrasy, maybe.  Keyboards have changed over time:  Older models often can't detect certain combinations of 3-4 keys pressed at once.  That doesn't mean they're BROKEN or that they need to be replaced!

This is just a software problem that happens with certain pieces of hardware.  It's not a reason for half the forum to go and replace their perfectly-functional keyboards and power supplies.  Ugh.

[Jaqie Fox]

Sounds like someone doesn't like being told their hardware is faulty.

Just because you don't like the truth doesn't mean it's wrong.

And yes, this *IS* a hardware fault. I'm done with this poster, you can argue at the wall for all I care.

[ October 09, 2007: Message edited by: Jaqie Fox ]

[Tahin]

All right, time to bust out my old ps/2 keyboard and see if that fixes the problem...

EDIT: And also, one of my computers that I play DF on is a more-or-less brand new laptop with a several-week-old usb numpad, so something tells me it hasn't died yet.

EDIT 2: To clarify, it does do it on that laptop, and it only does it in DF. As in, no other program has this issue.

[ October 09, 2007: Message edited by: Tahin ]

[ October 09, 2007: Message edited by: Tahin ]

[Jaqie Fox]

new != good.

There is a ~18% failure rate of brand new electronics across the board.  And this is the ones without design faults.  And then theres the possibility of incompatibilities between hardware parts causing such problems.

It could be any single part or the way several of the parts you are using interacting in a way that causes the problem.  there are and have been many, many problems such in the history of computers, one of which is an interrupt storm.  Hardware bug, with a software workaround. this does not indicate it was software, just that it was easier to write a software workaround for it then to tell people their hardware had bugs and to replace the hardware. many, many people will have the same reaction as the person above my previous post. Ahh, ignorance combined with pride and arrogance.

[ October 09, 2007: Message edited by: Jaqie Fox ]

[Turgid Bolk]

It doesn't seem like an unreasonable reaction to me, no pride or arrogance required. Anyway, while I have almost zero experience with hardware, and only a bit with software, it seems like you're saying it most likely *can* be worked around in the code somewhere? No other software on my computer has this problem, so DF should be able to work around it, too? Or would I really have to try replacing each bit of hardware? (Not that I would, I'm just wondering if it could be easily fixed.)

Edit: Basically, is it possible for Toady to work on it, or are the ~18% of us just out of luck?

[ October 09, 2007: Message edited by: Turgid Bolk ]

[JT]

I don't think Jaqie is correct in this case, because many users are experiencing this issue -- myself included -- and my keyboard has never had any problems (compare with my previous keyboard, where the left home row and its adjacent keys failed on sporadic intervals).  Further, I get this problem in no other game or program; keys only get stuck if I exceed the simultaneous key limit, whereupon key-up events can be ignored by the keyboard driver.  In Dwarf Fortress, keys get stuck with just the shift key and a single direction key.

Are you just using the Win32 API, Toady?  It's possible that Windows itself has spotty keyboard handling in that case.  I've also noted problems with how Dwarf Fortress distinguishes uppercase characters with lowercase characters (for instance, if you hit Caps Lock, most of the keys no longer work until you toggle Caps Lock off), so it's possible that the Shift+Key combination might be registering as a different symbol on different keyboard drivers.

[Lightning4]

Yeah, I can confirm too that I've reproduced it in the way Toady described. Having multiple direction keys pressed seems to do it occasionally.
Granted, the keyboard is slightly old and getting a bit... crusty.

[herrbdog]

I have played DF on over six different machines now, and it happens on every one. They are new and old hardware. However, at ~18% that should mean only one (maybe two) would do this. However, they all do it.

I still think it is a Windows API issue myself (as I have thought before about this).

[Eagle of Fire]

The person who think it's hardware related is out of his mind. I can reproduce this bug 100% of the time. What I do is hit shift, hit the direction then continue to hit the direction while releasing shift or do it the other way around. I'd have to fire up DF to make certain of the order, but I reported this bug along with a lot of other people in the past from what I've read, and I always thought this bug was already categorized and filed. Why are we still talking about it?

[Toady One]

I think I'm use a mess of the windows message loop and GetKeyState() calls, and yeah, sometimes it skips posting a message and the states don't return correctly at times.

[Tahin]

So that means you can fix it? I've had it stick permanently before, and had to ctrl+alt+dlt out of DF, which is a slight problem.