In writing games that deal with scancodes, what do I need to know to support international keyboards on Mac and PC?

Question

I am writing an input system for a game that needs to be able to handle keyboard schemes that are not just qwerty. In designing the system, I must take into consideration:

• Two types of input: standard shooter controls (lots of buttons being pressed and raw samples collected) and flight sim controls (the button's label is what the user presses to toggle something)
• Alternative software keyboard layouts (dvorak, azerty, etc) as supplied by the OS
• Alternative hardware keyboard layouts that supply Unicode characters

My initial inclination is to sample the USB HID unicode scancodes. Interested on thoughts on what I need to do to be compatible with the world's input devices and recommendation of input APIs on both platforms.

Answer 1

Simple solution is to allow customization of input. In the control customization, record what key the OS tells you has been pressed. In game, when you get a key press, check it against your list of bound keys and do the appropriate action.

Answer 2

It looks You need a cross platform library for games. You can look at SDL:
http://www.libsdl.org/

It is quite popular in game development.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_using_SDL

The library is quite modular. You can only use part that control input.