Mouse performance & Mouse sensitivity
theleggett
Join Date: 2012-06-19 Member: 153457Members
Join Date: 2012-06-19 Member: 153457Members
<div class="IPBDescription">Huge boost in performance found</div>Please forgive (and correct) me if I use the wrong terminology for any of the following. I do not play any games on the competitive level but will describe things as best as possible.
<b>One of the biggest pain points</b> for me in NS2 has been the performance of the game. Specifically, it never seemed like I was able to control my mouse movements as well as I could in other games. I attributed this to the NS2 engine since I don't experience this in other games. Also, my mouse has a 6400dpi system, which I am led to believe is better than average.
<b>The problem:</b> When I try to move my crosshair just a sub-pixel to the right, I instead move in 5-10 pixel increments.
Originally, I thought this was just an FPS issue. After experimenting today, I realize this is not the case. First I tried customizing my mouse settings outside of NS2. I still experienced the same issue.
However, if I lower the Mouse Sensitivity setting in NS2 to almost the lowest possible setting on the slider, I have much greater control on my aim again. When combined with a high mouse sensitive setting on my system (outside of NS2), the gameplay feels much more fluid, and I'm able to track targets effectively like in other FPS games.
Maybe this is intentional, but I never have experienced this in any other game. I'm not sure there is ever a case where moving the mouse at its smallest possible increment should change my FPS view by increments of 10 pixels
Perhaps pixels are a poor unit of measurement... degrees makes more sense, but I did not do any analysis of how many degrees I am turning per mouse movement. A guess would be that I was moving 3-5* at a time, when I would rather be able to have much more precise control by moving at sub-degree increments.
<b>TL;DR: The "Mouse Sensitivity" setting in NS2 seems off to me. I found that by moving this slider to nearly the lowest setting, and then boosting my mouse sensitivity outside of the game, I was able to track targets much more effectively.</b>
<b>One of the biggest pain points</b> for me in NS2 has been the performance of the game. Specifically, it never seemed like I was able to control my mouse movements as well as I could in other games. I attributed this to the NS2 engine since I don't experience this in other games. Also, my mouse has a 6400dpi system, which I am led to believe is better than average.
<b>The problem:</b> When I try to move my crosshair just a sub-pixel to the right, I instead move in 5-10 pixel increments.
Originally, I thought this was just an FPS issue. After experimenting today, I realize this is not the case. First I tried customizing my mouse settings outside of NS2. I still experienced the same issue.
However, if I lower the Mouse Sensitivity setting in NS2 to almost the lowest possible setting on the slider, I have much greater control on my aim again. When combined with a high mouse sensitive setting on my system (outside of NS2), the gameplay feels much more fluid, and I'm able to track targets effectively like in other FPS games.
Maybe this is intentional, but I never have experienced this in any other game. I'm not sure there is ever a case where moving the mouse at its smallest possible increment should change my FPS view by increments of 10 pixels
Perhaps pixels are a poor unit of measurement... degrees makes more sense, but I did not do any analysis of how many degrees I am turning per mouse movement. A guess would be that I was moving 3-5* at a time, when I would rather be able to have much more precise control by moving at sub-degree increments.
<b>TL;DR: The "Mouse Sensitivity" setting in NS2 seems off to me. I found that by moving this slider to nearly the lowest setting, and then boosting my mouse sensitivity outside of the game, I was able to track targets much more effectively.</b>
Comments
Mouse sensitivity slider
Usable Unusable
<---> <------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->
*edit*
If you want to fine tune your sensitivity
appdata/roaming/natural selection 2/options.xml
search for
<mouse>
<invert>false</invert>
<sensitivity>sensitivity here</sensitivity>
</mouse>
I find around 0.1 is nice for matching windows sensitivity
i recommend 1080p at fullscreen: <a href="http://youtu.be/o-trFScG544" target="_blank">http://youtu.be/o-trFScG544</a>
the game itself doesn't play fluid at all, even though the graphics aren't that spectacular. i have a good sysytem which displays bf3 with ultra details on high fps, even when everywhere everything explodes. i've never experienced this before.
but aiming just doesn't feel right. it's not possible to control where you shoot. this is a big issue because "lagging skulks" are already a big problem for me.
i hope all this gets fixed, because the game itself is as good as i expected it. except that the performance is awful and the "mouse performance" sucks too...
this really could ruin my long term motivation to play this game, which would be very sad as i love NS since it was a mod.
dtheta = sensitivity * dx
Where sensitivity converts centimeters into angles, for example sensitivity = 45 degree per centimeter.
Now the minimum angle you can turn your camera is given by: sensitivity * minimum(dx).
What is strange is that it seems that it's people with high resolution mouses (so very small minimum(dx)) what have troubles, when it should be the contrary.
IGN also tested the combat mod and where thinking it was the real ns2... and the marine aiming is probably more a matter of settings and performance as it seems, and not bugged in its core.
So you need to decrease sensitivity in NS2 and increase it in windows ?
I don't really know how it works but I would imagine that NS2 get the mouse input as dx*sensitivityWindows and then multiply that by the NS2 sensitivity:
dtheta = sensitivityNS2 * sensitivityWindows * dx
Then if you increase ten fold the NS2 sensitivity and decrease ten fold the windows sensitivity, it shouldn't change anything. The only way it could change is if there is some precision problem, like if (sensitivityWindows * dx) is too small to be encoded correctly with the game precision.
i believe whatever mouse input handler the code uses triggers a mouse movement event when windows says the cursor has moved by at least a pixel, instead of reading the mouse input directly or through directx (this means that high resolution mice and sub pixel movements are undetected). until this changes, there will be no way to fix this.
related:
<a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee418864(v=vs.85).aspx" target="_blank">http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wi...4(v=vs.85).aspx</a>
i believe that the current implementation of mouselook uses the first method of mouse tracking, whereas in an fps using directinput or some way of detecting high def input would be appropriate.
i believe ns2 ignores the mouse acceleration setting.
related:
<a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee418864(v=vs.85).aspx" target="_blank">http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wi...4(v=vs.85).aspx</a>
i believe that the current implementation of mouselook uses the first method of mouse tracking, whereas in an fps using directinput or some way of detecting high def input would be appropriate.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Wrong. I don't want to say more, because, frankly I am not very well versed in the topic but mouse movement is taken using wm_input. As that page you linked to points out, this is the suggested method.
This way it would always move at some small angle, let's say 1 pixel or .1 degrees or something, but it would require 10 dots to move at the lowest sensitivity and 1 dot at the highest sensitivity.
perhaps the raw input is indeed taken from wm_input, but some other part of code implements the previous behavior because that's the way the game behaves. and having looked through some of the lua files, there are definitely parts of the game (commander mode for example) that do use it.
I think to remember ns2 is affected by windows settings.
"enhance pointer precision" is mouse acceleration. This is of course a terrible thing if the game does not read raw mouse data; with acceleration on you cannot do twitch aiming, because the amount by which you turn is not proportional to how far you've moved the mouse because it also depends very strongly on how fast you moved the mouse.
Also, for some reason I cannot type in game.