There's no way to just plain delete a button mapping nor does attempting to remap a key to a button that's already in use simply remove the old assigned key and assign it into the new button like you'd expect, instead the game just throws a 'key is already in use' error from which you cannot escape and are instead forced to map the key to a button.

For some bizarre reason only Japanese PC game development could fathom, you're forced to have two sets of buttons on the same keyboard active at all times, supposedly acting as player 1 and player 2. But the problem is, the game treats the keyboard as being only 1P at all times, which you can notice on how both sets of buttons control player 1 only. Now chances are, you're never going to need both players' buttons assigned to one keyboard (cuz it's not like you'd find another person to play this game with ayyyyyy) so this is wholly unnecessary, but unavoidable with the way the game provides.

All of this means you have to map the buttons into whatever keys that are not in the way of your preferred layout, juggling both 1P and 2P buttons at the same time, and then map the correct keys you want to use, leaving dumb random keys assigned to whatever buttons instead of just the ones you want. This creates unnecessary clutter instead of just being concise and clean. There are also keys, like Enter or Backspace, that you cannot assign at all.

Now, the solution.

You could just get a MixBox style controller, but that's not why you're here.

Navigate to %LOCALAPPDATA%\EXF\Saved\IDConfigs (aka Personal folder > AppData > Local...)
Inside, you'll find two files: kb_id_00.ini and kb_id_01.ini. These are the input map files for 1P and 2P respectively. You'll mostly be interested in the 1P buttons.



Opening the file up in your favorite text editor, you'll see this:



The syntax of the file is as follows: First is the corresponding key on your keyboard using English ANSI/ISO layout (eg. no special keys, like Ö or Å), and after the equals sign is the corresponding in-game button as a number. As most PC games, Fighting EX Layer uses an Xbox controller as the base for it's buttons, which looks like this:



These buttons correspond to the numbers in the .ini as follows:

0 = Empty/Unassigned
1 = Start
2 = Back/Select
3 = A
4 = B
5 = X
6 = Y
7 = Right Trigger
8 = Right Button/Bumper
9 = Left Trigger
10 = Left Button/Bumper
11 = Right Stick (Button)
12 = Left Stick (Button)
13 = DPad Up
14 = Dpad Down
15 = Dpad Right
16 = Dpad Left

Using this information, you can now manually edit the button into whatever key the .ini provides. For example, Enter=1 corresponds to the 'Enter' key being the 'Start' button.

If you're like me and you like to use the arrow keys as the movement buttons, you don't have to map them manually as the game uses them by default. In other words, you can leave the 'Up', 'Down', 'Right' and 'Left' keys as 0, or unassigned, and they'll still work as the DPad. From my testing, these are the only keys that are hard coded in the game to function like this, everything else you can map as you please.

As previously stated, you probably don't need 2P buttons on your keyboard, so you can open the other .ini file and set all the keys to 0 to get them out of the way.

After you've done editing the keys to your liking, save the file and set it as 'Read-only' to prevent the game from overwriting it and resetting your buttons. As a precaution just in case you mess something up, remember to create backup copies of the files before you save them.



Now, you can boot the game and go into the Controller menu and set up your punches and kicks into the buttons you just set.

For your convenience, I'll include two premade configs in Pastebin - One for my preferred layout, and the other for unassigning all 2P buttons. Just copypaste the text in the corresponding .ini file.

https://pastebin.com/m73eiA4W
https://pastebin.com/A55hvtFJ

On a standard keyboard, my layout looks like this:


MS Paint rulez.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Happy FEXLing!