AZERTY keyboard support

Dear ED, please make DCS support AZERTY (French keyboard layout). Right now it's only supporting QWERTY so it is very confusing when it comes to finding certain keys. Some keys don't match so it can make things a bit tricky. For example if I want to find the key assigned to the wheel brakes and the sim shows me "W", pressing "W" won't work. I will need to find the equivalent key on the AZERTY which is "A".

I was quite annoyed by this since I started with Lock On in 2005 but oddly enough I have never posted anything about it on the forum. Sorry if this has been talked about in the past already but I did a search and couldn't find anything on the matter.

All the differences are highlighted in green. As you can see, quite a few...

The way a computer OS handles keyboard layouts makes it pretty difficult to do this.

A keypress on ANY keyboard (QWERTY, AZERTY, QWERTZ, ASCII) basically produces a key code for the key.

The OS or more precisely the country settings define what "keys" are shown in an application, on screen etc.

I know what you mean, but it wouldn't help if you had a AZERTY layout, as the position of certain groups of keys (A-10C slew, DMS, TMS for example) are arranged in a logical way, so you can easily use it.

Imagine the typical W,A,S,D controls weirdly distributed over the keyboard to match a specific country layout.

What helps a lot, is to print a standard ANSI US keyboard layout and use it as reference, do not look for a certain key, but instead learn the position and its designation in your AZERTY keyboard until you remember intuitive what keys do what.

Here is a link to a classic ANSI layout.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/37/ANSI_Keyboard_Layout_Diagram_with_Form_Factor.svg/2000px-ANSI_Keyboard_Layout_Diagram_with_Form_Factor.svg.png

The way a computer OS handles keyboard layouts makes it pretty difficult to do this.

I don't see how it would be difficult at all. Now, I'm not a developper but all one needs to do is make the game aware that Windows is in French and that when a key is pressed it should be associated to an azerty layout. 99% of games work perfectly fine with azerty so I can't understand why DCS is an exception right now.

I know what you mean, but it wouldn't help if you had a AZERTY layout, as the position of certain groups of keys (A-10C slew, DMS, TMS for example) are arranged in a logical way, so you can easily use it.

Imagine the typical W,A,S,D controls weirdly distributed over the keyboard to match a specific country layout.

No actually the key locations will remain the same. It's only the key names that will change. For example, instead of W,A,S,D we have Z,Q,S,D but the keys are still physically the same.

So you wouldn't have to stretch your fingers to operate the DMS or slew controls, nothing would change.