As a start I think I’ll just lay down a little bit of work I was doing in Java towards information input and analyzation. A recent computer science class I’ve been taking has us using an IDE called BlueJ, so it’s out of this that you’ll see all these pictures.
I was told once about, within any particular game, the control scheme of using ZXCV on the keyboard with your left hand or actions, and pairing it with your right hand on the arrow keys. It sounded familiar and I wasn’t a fan at first, but I got to thinking about it so much I started writing out some ideas for how ZXCV + Arrow Keys could be set to cover a very wide majority of video game genres. So, inspired, I wanted to build a game based on making very quick three character sequences out of the keys ZXCV. I wanted to find out what were the easiest three letter sequences to type. So I made this.
It’s just a single class, I didn’t feel like any more were needed at the time though now I can think of a few alternatives that would have greatly sped up the process. This was written and basically completed on 2015.05.17.
I asked some people to just take their left hand, place it on the ZXCV keys, and press buttons without thinking about how they pressed it. I developed the class to accept a single, massive string of characters (like this 1504 character long one here) to receive the letters, remove everything that wasn’t a z, x, c, or v, and register all the possible forwards-reading 3 character sequences out of the string. Then it displays a bunch of information:
Copying the massive string into the object’s constructor.
METHOD A through C just checks the string three different ways to get all possible sequences. It sees how often each letter was pressed, and then, most importantly, gets the most often typed sequence. As it turns out, I got eight people including myself to type a fairly large string, and the top sequences was “xcv” in six of them. “zxc” in the other two.
This is another function written in the same class, which was really the most necessary. This is the same 1504 characters string but provides a look at all the sequences stored within a cubic matrix in the class. With this, and especially with much larger strings, I should be very easily able to get a list top to bottom of the easier to harder to press sequences. Though, this doesn’t account for left-handed people. I’m not really sure how that would affect it.
The only thing I didn’t complete was a method that just runs through the cubic matrix and writes that list of all 64 possible sequences in order of frequency. In fact, I wasn’t quite sure how to get it done. This seems to work just as well anyhow.
