Hello Unreal Engine Team,
I am writing this to request a feature that would greatly improve the life of thousands of developers worldwide: Native support and automatic detection for non-QWERTY keyboard layouts, specifically AZERTY.
The Problem
Currently, both the Unreal Engine Editor (Viewport navigation) and all official templates (First Person, Third Person, etc.) hardcode the QWERTY layout (WASD).
For developers using AZERTY keyboards (France, Belgium, etc.), this means:
- We must manually rebind all viewport keys every time we install a new version of the engine.
- Basic template inputs are completely unplayable out of the box (ZQSD becomes completely broken).
- The new Enhanced Input system still requires manual, tedious replication of mappings for different layouts.
The Proposed Solution
We need Unreal Engine to implement a hardware scancode-based input system instead of a virtual-key system for its basic tools, or at least a layout detection toggle.
- Editor: Automatically adapt viewport navigation keys (WASD to ZQSD) based on the operating system’s active language/layout.
- Templates: Provide an automatic fallback in default templates so that games work correctly regardless of the player’s keyboard layout without manual blueprints/C++ tweaks.
This small quality-of-life feature would make Unreal Engine much more accessible and welcoming to international developers and beginners.
Thank you for listening to the community!