First-Person mode SpringLobby vs ZK Lobby

When I start a game from the ZK Lobby, whenever I have a constructor selected I can press "C" and it will take me to the defense tab. This is the behavior I expect.

When I start a game from SpringLobby, whenever I have a constructor selected and I press "C" it takes me into first person view. I've been looking at the settings but I can't figure out why it's doing this. I thought the shortcut key for first person view had changed to something else.

Any ideas?

In general, SpringLobby and ZK Lobby will give you different behaviors for a handful of things, including stuff like keybindings. That's because they use separate instances of the Spring engine and separate sets of config files.

The config settings you get with ZK Lobby are maintained by the ZK developers and in general they're well-suited to ZK gameplay.

The config settings you get with SpringLobby are generic, intended either for "any Spring game" or more likely "works good with BA" since that's what most people used to play. The ZK devs don't have any control over those.

The settings in question are stored in uikeys.txt, selectkeys.txt, and cmdcolors.txt . You can get the ones that ZKL uses from this directory in the ZK source code repository. If you download those and copy them to your SpringLobby installation, you should get more-or-less the same behavior that you're used to from ZKL.

Glad to hear you got it working! Yes, you're right - SL points to a single engine instance and expects to see the config files there; ZK uses multiple engine instances (where needed) and uses a single set of configs for all of them.