Past EED rants

Labels

Live leaderboard

Poker leaderboard

Voice of EED

Monday 21 May 2007

How's your mouse? [Lurks]

Ever since the Counter-Strike revival starting with our first proper LAN parties, I've never been happy with how my basic point and shoot stuff has worked. Not as happy as I was with it way back in the day before Source, and all that jazz. Maybe that's just me getting old, I thought, but really I couldn't aim properly at a barn door if my life depended it as it frequently does.
So today I started a bit of monkeying around. I'm equipped with a decent Logitech G5 mouse on one of those fancy textured mats. I run at 2000dpi setting and really no amount of messing with the in-game 'sensitivity' setting made stuff how I liked, so I just kept messing with it sure that this was all that was wrong. After all the rest is good right?
I did a bit of Googling and it seems there's a fair whack of people out there that swear that Logitech's swish mouse stuff is a bit shit. Here's the thing, you generally want this on because it gives you a couple of cool things such as the ability to set mouse sensitivity and, vitally, mouse acceleration in Windows and in game quite seperately. Basically mouse acceleration in Windows is pretty cool. You turn down your overall sensitivity and then you just get to the other side of the screen by moving your hand faster. Probably most people use it, MS calls it 'enhance pointer precision'. Unfortunately if you enable it in Windows, it's enabled in games. In games it's basically fucked because you want to do a smooth 180 kind of independent of how fast you might do it.
I have no doubt some elite gamers somewhere get this right and have mouse acceleration in in game. In theory this would be better. Enhanced precision for sniping, faster movement with a minimum of hand movements for manouvering but I'm just not one of those people.
The thing is though, getting back to people saying the Logitech stuff is shit. I turned it off and selected 'OS implementation'. Turned off mouse acceleration in Windows, whacked down the pointer movement speed loads (soon as you turn off enhance pointer precision you need to) and then went into CS. Bugger me, this is what my mouse used to be like. This is exactly what I had in mind... I was just blindly trusting Logitech to have this shit right, after all it just defies any logic that they'd make gaming mice, make this Setpoint stuff and get all this wrong. However this does seem to be almost an established wisdom if kiddies posting on forums is any indication.
It's probably a personal thing but I'd urge you to try it. Now I can 180 like I used to do and sniping with a rifle isn't so painful as it was with the setpoint implementation. Eg. I'd have my mouse set to 2000dpi, I'd be running on sensitivity around the 15 mark and yet if I moved the mouse a little bitty bit to snipe or whatever, it wouldn't move at all until the mouse moved a bit. That's just broken, it strikes me?
What do you guys use? Mouse, settings, all that jazz.

6 comments:

  1. G5 with what i think is standard settings. I use the fastest all around, except when it comes to sniping when punch down two and get el l33t0r slow as fuck mode. Still on the giant steelpad qck+ mousemat, since its huuuge and rox.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Still have a mx510 here, in windows control panel, I have pointer accelleration on notch 3 (low) & "disable mouse acceleration in games" checked.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This here blog made me go and have a root around in my settings to check all was well. In the end I also had to take off acceleration which helped a lot but the other thing I did was also de-sync the x and y axis movement so that I could relatively desensitise my vertical movement from my horizontal movement in CS. This helped last night as twitches left to right are a lot bigger of necessity, I would argue generally, than the need to make big up / down movements. In desensitising the up/down I was able to counteract my natural tendency borne of Q3 as my training ground to over-react to enemy threats especially in the y axis.
    It helped. Oh that and the fook off machine gun :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. That's a good idea that. How do you do that then?

    ReplyDelete
  5. One of the tabs in the logi setpoint middleware thing has two vertical sliders for the sensitivity of each of the three sensitivity settings on the mouse. By default they move up and down together but there's a check box to allow you to do them separately so you can isolate x from y. Bosh.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ah so I have to enable the logitech stuff...

    ReplyDelete