Still severe mouse skipping after 1.04.

[acrh2]

The new mouse smoothing makes the mouse movement a little better, but the biggest problem, mouse skipping, still remains.

By mouse skipping I mean an artifact in the mouse movement, where the mouse input is not registered when it comes in too fast for the game to handle. In other words, some mouse input is skipped when the mouse is moved fast.

The problem is especially severe for players who prefer low mouse sensitivity. For example, my mouse sensitivity in windows (xp) mouse control panel (native winxp control panel, no other mouse drivers installed) is about half the sensitivity slider. The mouse itself is Logitech mx518, in 1800dpi mode. When I move the mouse across the desktop space (1280x), it requires about 4 inches of movement to go from the left to the right side. In the game, my mouse sensitivity slider is all the way to the left.

What this configuration gives in the game is the following:
1) When I move the mouse at medium speed, it makes a 180 degree turn in about 3 inches of movement on the mousepad.
2) When I move the mouse fast, by the same 3 inches on the mousepad, it makes a turn that is more like 90 degrees.
3) And finally, when I move the mouse really fast, it makes a small degree turn and then locks up the movement on the screen completely.

Here's a couple of videos that demonstrate this behavior. The first video is mouse movement in quake3. The second, in arma2.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gIWhiRcykg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od-HpEXaW00


Now, the question is: are the developers going to fix this?

[Bulldogs]

I miss my mx518, man that was a good mouse...

Anyways, I'm not really sure about this issue. I noticed myself that if I move the mouse slower it seems to move faster, but that feels right to me (maybe it's just me), I know that mouse movement isn't meant to be anything like Quake, BF2, etc, being that it's not a traditional FPS, and we've all heard that tired old debate, but I think that may be the cause. In an effort to avoid traditional mouse movement it may have created this mouse jerk problem.

When I get a chance I'll give it a go at different DPI settings to see, but to me it feels right, doesn't play anything like other shooters, but plays like it should for me, but I'll see if I can replicate what you are explaining.

Just as a side note, the way it's meant to be (at least the way I think it's meant to be) is that you turn the mouse slowly and you turn slowly, turn the mouse fast and you turn faster to a limit point, that point being that you can't do a full 360 in a second (being not humanly possible). Obviously if it's moving faster at lower speeds then that's something going wrong there.

[acrh2]

I miss my mx518, man that was a good mouse...

Anyways, I'm not really sure about this issue. I noticed myself that if I move the mouse slower it seems to move faster, but that feels right to me (maybe it's just me), I know that mouse movement isn't meant to be anything like Quake, BF2, etc, being that it's not a traditional FPS, and we've all heard that tired old debate, but I think that may be the cause. In an effort to avoid traditional mouse movement it may have created this mouse jerk problem.

When I get a chance I'll give it a go at different DPI settings to see, but to me it feels right, doesn't play anything like other shooters, but plays like it should for me, but I'll see if I can replicate what you are explaining.

Just as a side note, the way it's meant to be (at least the way I think it's meant to be) is that you turn the mouse slowly and you turn slowly, turn the mouse fast and you turn faster to a limit point, that point being that you can't do a full 360 in a second (being not humanly possible). Obviously if it's moving faster at lower speeds then that's something going wrong there.

I noticed myself that if I move the mouse slower it seems to move faster, but that feels right to me (maybe it's just me)

That doesn't make sense, the feeling right part.

Just as a side note, the way it's meant to be (at least the way I think it's meant to be) is that you turn the mouse slowly and you turn slowly, turn the mouse fast and you turn faster to a limit point, that point being that you can't do a full 360 in a second (being not humanly possible).

That's a little better. I think that's what they were going for. I just measured the maximum speed of turning with slow and fast mouse movement (with fraps and virtualdubmod, I measured the actual speed). They appear to the be the same.

However, like you said, this feels completely counterintuitive when playing the game - you move the mouse faster, and it feels slower. It feels like the mouse is skipping and it doesn't feel right. I hope they would fix it.

[MadDogX]

The explanation is fairly simple. Quoting myself from another thread:

Let's say the maximum turn speed in the game is 180°/s (one hundred and eighty degrees per second) and your horizontal mouse movement translates to 90°/cm (ninety degrees per centimeter), meaning you have to move the mouse 2cm to the right to do a 180° right turn.

This means that the fastest you can effectively move the mouse is 2cm/s. Anything above that will cross the turning speed threshold, meaning your turning speed will be calculated purely by the amount of time your mouse spends moving. In other words: the faster you move your mouse, the less you will turn - no matter how far you move it.

When you consider that the maximum turning rate (in our example) is 180°/s, slamming the mouse over the mouse mat at breakneck speed while only making contact for 0.2 seconds will cause you to turn a whopping 36°. If we factor in another 0.2 seconds to move the mouse back to the original position, we would need 2 seconds to make a 180° turn - twice as long as if you simply moved the mouse slowly. But since you slammed the mouse across whole the mat five times, you'll be wondering what the hell went wrong...

Please not that the example above is purely hypothetical and the values are imaginary. It is simply meant to explain how the limited turn speed causes the issue people describe.

[SaBrE_UK]

Anything (well, not anything) that subtly prevents Arma2 from becoming a twitch shooter is good in my opinion.

[MehMan]

I have the same problem too.


With an open ticket.

Anything (well, not anything) that subtly prevents Arma2 from becoming a twitch shooter is good in my opinion.

It's not about being a twitch shooter, but being able to corelate the movement of your mouse to the movement of your character. And I can't start to count the number of times I got killed in CQB because somebody appeared on my right and I tried to turn rapidly but got shot before I could reach him due to just that. It's just in the way and annoying. Every shooter since doom has been using this system and with a reason! In ArmA/ArmA2 it just feels like there's a bunch of bricks tied to the arms of my character, the faster I try to move him, the slower he does it. It's a big problem for me, because it just ruins the gameplay, it can be a problem to lineup on a target far away, or just react in a fast enough manner.

[MadDogX]

It's not about being a twitch shooter...

Okay, if you say so.

And I can't start to count the number of times I got killed in CQB because somebody appeared on my right and I tried to turn rapidly but got shot before I could reach him due to just that.

Turning and shooting rapidly... you mean like in those twitch shooters? Or as you so deftly put it:

Every shooter since doom

I'm confused.

[acrh2]

Okay, if you say so.



Turning and shooting rapidly... you mean like in those twitch shooters? Or as you so deftly put it:



I'm confused.

The game skips mouse input. IMHO, any game that skips or ignores player input is a badly designed game.
A much better way to handle the "twitch shooter issue" would be to increase weapons sway if turning too fast. Say, if you start turning faster than the current maximum speed, your gun starts swaying, swaying more the faster you turn.

[MehMan]

I'm confused.

Righto, having proper control over your character doesn't turn the game into Quake 3. What does turn it into Quake 3 is corridors, laser guns and rocket launchers. As you can see, we are far away from that. Besides, we're still missing a huge aspect for it to become a twitch shooter: jump. How can you call a game a twitch shooter without rocket jumps?

[Alex72]

By mouse skipping I mean an artifact in the mouse movement, where the mouse input is not registered when it comes in too fast for the game to handle. In other words, some mouse input is skipped when the mouse is moved fast.

Yes. I have the same problem. When there is a bit of action happening and FPS goes down just slightly - the mouse when moving it anything over snail speed skips almost an inch at the time. I have been trying to conquer that with different settings before i would come here and post about it. And i cannot get the mouse to function well again. As a reference beta v59008 worked good for me.

I was one of those that had awesome mouse handling before BIS started changing it around and the introduction of the slider made it pretty good - not as good as it was from start (since ArmA1 perfect), but i was ready to stop nagging about it as there is more people to think about. However from beta v59025 and v1.04 this problem has arrived as OP describes.

And it is a big mouse problem. It skips so much that i can not see whats on the screen when i turn/move. Im using the MX518.

EDIT: I posted this in the 1.04 thread. I thaught it might be bad performance first, but as you can read i thaught it had to do with the mouse.

Alex