Easy bidirectional strafing--is it just my keyboard?

[radiant]

My control mapping involves Z and left arrow both being set to left turn, and X and right arrow being set to right turn. The keyboard is a backlit Saitek model, and I'm wondering if it's just a quirk of that keyboard or a general Armagetron priority handler that allows me to perform an innovative steering maneuver.

If I press Z+X simultaneously, the Z is picked up before the X for a net effect of left turn then right turn, or a small strafe to the left. However, if I hit left+right, right gets picked up first, so I turn right then left for a small strafe to the right. The fact that each control always strafes predictably and in different directions allows me to strafe back and forth quickly (ideally I try to keep a metronome at 8Hz) with patterns such as L1 R2 L2 R2 L2 R2...with the goal of making my walls difficult to follow or grind for any length of time, and generally being confusing to those who get too close and aren't familiar with the pattern.

Is this behavior common to those who have tried, or is there something unique about the key priorities on this particular keyboard?

[-=King Crab=-]

At my school, people did the same thing to keep other from grinding on their walls, and it was called a hook.
I don't know about others, but this was a common practice for my school.

[Tank Program]

the wall's still continuous right?

[Z-Man]

It's not just your keyboard, I observe this here in a completely different setup, too. Interesting! The priorities are not set by AA itself, though, we're processing input events as they are fed to us by SDL. I suspect SDL collects events sent by the OS before passing them on to the application and sorts them somehow.

[radiant]

the wall's still continuous right?

Yes, it's continuous. It looks something like this:

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for the purpose of being difficult to work around. If there were gaps in the walls at the horizontal shifts, it wouldn't be nearly as effective.

[Tank Program]

Gotcha.