Joel – Page 7

April 28, 2012January 29, 2013

How to Fix Mouse Input / Lag / Acceleration / Deceleration in Battlefield 3 and Some Random Old Mouse History

Update: Apparently the latest patch/DLC (early June) has caused more mouse problems for BF3. I am attempting to compile a list of possible fixes. Try turning on vsync if you have not done so already, and leave a comment if the fixes below help with the new lag that has developed.

vsync introduces at least a 1 frame delay to input. At 60FPS you are seeing the movement in the 61st or 62nd frame. This is a delay to the order of 16.6 or 33.3ms, but it can strech out to 3-4 frames depending on the shoddyness of the developer. This is probably not what is causing the mouse lag in the most recent patch but I thought including it here might be useful to someone.

I have gamed for a long time and a long time ago I learnt that low mouse sensitivity with no acceleration is the best way to play. It leads to less “mistakes”, higher accuracy, less effected by cold hands or nerves – not applicable to me but many of the guys I used to game with would get nervous before important matches. It is overall better. The one proviso is you need to stay situationally aware at all times, else you get shot in the back and can’t turn around quickly enough. In most older games this was not a problem, but in BF3, with its horrid sound system this IS a problem. A problem for another post.

Unlike some super anal FPS people I have never sat down and measured my base sensitivity and then applied this to all games. I just go with what feels about right. This is probably because I have only really ever played one FPS at a time.

Around the end of Unreal Tournament 2003 I switched to a Microsoft Intellimouse v3 and then to a Razer Deathadder two years later. Both mice have similar shapes which I was happy with. In 2009 I started to suffer from wrist pains using the Deathadder. As a result I opted to grab a new Steelseries Xai – a mouse that had received a lot of hype and was a completely different shape to the MS v3 and Deathadder. My wrist pains went away.

It is a rather fail, mouse as it has non removable positive acceleration. At the time I was playing Quake Live and testing out in game acceleration, which I liked, and which Q3 does awesomely. I like how you can set thresholds and maximum values and almost have high/low speed with little inbetween. This masked the problem enough that I did not care. Now I play Battlefield 3 which also has non removable positive acceleration, or so I thought. Many people played UT99 with horrible, video setting induced acceleration but were not aware of it because it was cool to have your sensitivity as high as humanly possible back then. Acceleration is not obvious with high sensitivity, but at the same time no acceleration will allow better aiming with high sens, it just does not feel as obvious.

Acceleration fixes

I do not pretend to be an expert on this, I know what works for me but I don’t really understand why.

One of the first things many gamers install with a fresh version of windows is some sort of mouse fix. Here is the one I used last. This sort of patch fixes acceleration problems in most games, because most acceleration problems are caused by the OS – at least in my limited understanding. The Battlefield 3 devs decided that we should have positive acceleration and no option to remove it via the menus, and in conjunction with the buggy Xai mouse movement ends up feeling sloppy, unresponsive and really not very nice.

I played until a few weeks ago without doing anything about this. I guess I had grown accustomed to the acceleration and was playing decently enough to not bother about trying to fix it – and I had found a fix, almost three months ago. I wish I had acted sooner.

Firstly you need to get some sort of text editor. I use Notepad++ for webdev and recommend it. If you have Ultraedit installed that should work too.

Find these lines:

GstInput.Scheme0Sensitivity 0.000000 GstInput.Scheme1Sensitivity 0.000000 GstInput.Scheme2Sensitivity 0.000000

And set them to zero.

Incase you were wondering – GstInput.MouseSensitivity 0.061047 – is your in game sensitivity in a number rather than a stupid slider bar.

Input feeling after applying this fix may vary – if you are a high sensitivity player then accel is not as noticeable. If you play with low sensitivity and you want no acceleration then this is a god send. Apparently high DPI also affects this, I play at 650 (up from 500) so these changes may really be masking the problem rather than solving it. For me it is close enough to not worry about anymore. 650DPI is perfectly acceptable for low sensitivity FPS.

Apply an operating system level fix such as this
Edit your config files as above
Set your mouse to a lower DPI setting. If you use low sensitivity you can go all the way down to 400DPI if required. Remember to adjust your in game sensitivity to suit.

Do you need 3500DPI when you use 30 inches for a full turn? In short no.

Another nice thing you can change in this file is your FOV. The maximum setting in game is 90 with the default being 60 – this is positively cramped. I run 120 which might be too high for most peoples tastes. There are drawbacks, hip firing is significantly harder with higher FOV, but the game feel so slow at lower that I am willing to suffer less hip kills. Change this line

GstRender.FieldOfView 120.000000

Finally if you are playing BF3 pick a weapon loadout that suits your style.

April 28, 2012November 12, 2012

Are jets really balanced and do dice have a hardon for them?

JoeKerr writes… here

Jets are supposed to be super-fast, intimidating bits of machinery

…so do you want them to be awesome or not?

I want jets to be balanced. I think part of the balance problem stems from Dice wanting non-infantry equipment to be significantly more durable and intimidating than infantry, whereas I think it should be simply like picking up another weapon.

Jets should be quick and easy to destroy – if your load out suits – just like it is quick and easy to kill another infantry player. This should be especially true on instant vehicle spawn servers. By the same token Jets should destroy other things quickly, which they apparently already do. Choppers, other jets and even ground targets melt before them.

This is not to say Battlefield 3 jets should be useless, or die when looked at, and a good pilot should be an asset that contributes to the overall game. Much the same way a good infantry player can turn the tide and help out significantly. There should be solid counters that are easily deployed by infantry and not limited to other vehicles or jets.

The current incarnation does not do this, it is extremely difficult to shoot down a jet as a non-jet, non-AA unit. The Whirlpool conversation on this topic continues along the lines that mobile AA and base AA is ok for killing aircraft. Other jets are also ok for killing jets. Infantry are pretty useless for killing jets.

I am not here to offer a balance solution because really, I don’t care and if jets (and even choppers) were removed my game would be relatively unaffected. This post is just here to say that jets should not be awesome and intimidating bits of high-speed machinery. They should be simply another facet of the game, that is balanced and similar to picking up another weapon in a more traditional FPS. Not similar to picking up quad damage plus invulnerability.

NussBuster writes… here

Yes, very good, I’ll be happy when they are. As it is they’re _any speed you want_, intimidating bits of machinery.

Sums it up quite well. I think the any speed is a dig at externally binding heavy brake.

April 28, 2012November 12, 2012

Friends lists are a bad benchmark of game popularity

VoodooMeatBucket writes… Somewhere in an old Whirlpool BF3 thread.

There was maybe 150 – 200 (130+ alone joined the WPP platoon) and now I would say there would be less than 50 and thats being VERY generous.

I don’t really feel this is a valid benchmark.

In my experience – sorry these titles are quite old.

q2-q3 reduced my friends list

ut-2k3-2k4 reduced my friends list each time

rtcw-et reduced my clanmates friends lists from the previous title

Vanilla World of Warfraft – Burning Crusade reduced my friends list

To be honest BF2-BF3 reduced my friends list the least because I played BF2 with casuals. They all play BF3. This is not to say that BF3 is “good” because of this, it is simply highlighting that friends lists are not a very good benchmark for player retention.

In all circumstances my friends list grew because of new players, with the exception of BF3 because I am not down with the hardcores.

April 28, 2012November 12, 2012

Sounds in FPS are not just for positioning

Parranoid writes… somewhere in an old Battlefield 3 thread on Whirlpool.

Quake and UT for armour/health/ammo pickups and CS for footsteps.

Some insight that newer FPS players might appreciate.

Sound for pickups were not just for positioning. Hearing a player pickup mega or an armour would then make you take note of the time on the game clock so you could come back later to contest the respawn.

On the flip side if you were getting the item and just drove off your opponent but did not kill them you could possibly delay till they are far enough away to not hear it. This would put their timing of the item off – based on the assumption that you picked it up as soon as possible after they ran away.

The obvious benefit from that is they will be hanging around waiting for it, but you could use it to offset multiple items so you have access to two pickups. Quite often the gap being too short and the other player getting one by default.

So not just for the here and now, but also predicting player movement with pickups in the future!

April 25, 2012November 12, 2012

UT and Q3 maps, armour and item timing

I don’t know who this was in reply to. It was in an old text file on my computer. I like it because it is about UT.

How many completly custom maps are played in competitve duel in lets say Q3?

At its peak 1-2. At UTs peak zero. At q3s peak a map list might contain 5-6 maps where as UT could be anything from 6-15 with insane things like tempest included for duelling. Percentage wise Q3 is way ahead, but more than just numbers it means the community will at least accept change.

Sphere and Davidm are not used regularly, they are not “standard” like ztn or aero. In addition to this no tweaks or community accepted additions were made to UT whereas they were made for q3. I feel this is because UT works well enough out of the box not to bother whereas Q3 was fairly broken. Also davidm, if it is the map with that name was not good, this map and the other third party ones around the same time were not very good.

I don’t care about TDM or CTF, however the UT map and item style means almost anything works.

I agree that in duel the difference in usage comes from the fact that in UT we can easly put not only 5 but even 7 playable standard maps, and so custom maps must compete with them.

Tempest was an accepted duel map up until at least 2002. I feel this highlights the problems with UT in general. Tempest was not a good duel map but it was played because it sort of worked. If you were playing for fun it was okish, if you were playing to win it was disgusting for all involved. Since tempest was accepted as a duel map so should have arcane, peak, crane and any of the other retarded non-duel suited maps that would work because of how UT appears to have been designed. I liked highlighting how bad some maps were and frequently won 1-0 vs all levels of players. Not because I had to win at all costs but to show them that the map was a joke.

In Q3 without custom maps we would have to play a very poor maps like T2 (yes, no more of that map) and even then T4 had to be kept (thx QL) 😛

And playing tempest is somehow better than playing t4? T4 is “better” for dueling than tempest ever was.

Not to mention both aerowalk and ztn, were made back in Q1.

Irrelevant. Remakes are acceptable if they are good maps that work on the new game. Both of these work in q3/whatever.

The pace in which UT weapons can deplete ammo is rather high, and respawn time for both weapons and ammo is 27.5sec, which make it impossible to replenish ammo as often as in Q3 with old 15sec settings.

Thats fine. However the weapon does not have to have the ammo next to it. Also the doubled up aspect of the weapons gives you twice as many pick ups that do similar things (rockets + falk alt, pulse + mini, shock + sniper, etcetc). Look at deck, pulse and mini next to each other WITH full ammo? Do you really need that many shots of hitscan in one place?

As for armours we must keep in mind they are much stronger than the ones in Quakes – Q3s yellow armour is equal to UTs pads, and Q3s red armour is even weaker than UTs body armour.

That is also fine, since the damage absorption is not the problem. Not to mention higher DPS weapons in UT, it makes sense that they absorb more. However with the DPS available the pads were not equal to yellow armour, they would have been equal to 3 shards.

And if it is about number, we had an example of what can happen if there are too many items on rather large maps in UT2003, where there was too much spread to control everything.

It was not really the quantity, more the duration of spawns, more specifically the respawn time of the belt vs the jacket and the slower game pace it promoted. The player with the belt has more advantage than just the protection it provides, he can also push the jacket on its second spawn without worrying about his item. This would be similar to playing Q3 with one armour and a mega. If you really want to count the pads, not that anyone serious did, this map you are thinking of has three armour shards somewhere.

You would have been spread too far in 2k3? That’s ok because with maps actually designed for duel you could overcome this and have an awesome game. Not to mention that spread is good. It breaks it down into two players items. If you are good you can make inroads into their items and win.

Instead you end up with something that basically works on every map ever created and is luke warm at best. This is not a problem really because I am sure it helped the popularity of original UT.

April 24, 2012November 12, 2012

I would say quake is not a fast paced FPS

Mav_au said..

Too old for fast paced 😛

.. somewhere in this thread.

The comment was made in relation to the new Tribes beta. I would say quake is fast paced.

Battlefield 3 is also fast paced, but in a different way. A more, twitchy way, which is funny because the Battlefield crowd on Whirlpool seem to think that “twitch” games are things like quake, COD (roll them together 🙁 ) and counter strike.

Checkout this random duel on my all time favorite map. Two of the best US players. Checkout 1:25ish. You don’t get quality like that in battlefield, or any current FPS for that matter! 😛

Is it fast paced? Sort of. Each encounter is significantly longer than a general encounter in Battlefield 3.

Here is an example of good Battlefield 3 infantry. Courtesy of the clanbase comp the Australian team won. I guess the closest you can get to the top quake players in the previous video.

Notice how all the encounters are very short. Short to the point that it is a “player who reacts first, wins” type deal. Compare that to the previous quake video. A few spawn kills may go that way, but generally there is a lot of tactics and drawn out encounters involved in converting each point. Primarily note the time of the first death, quite a while after the players have seen each other.

The tactics involved in the ongoing game for quake are extremely apparent. Back and forth, cutting the other player off, predicting movement and so on. This is not apparent at all in the Battlefield 3 video. In the Battlefield 3 videos defense it is a kill compilation so somewhat hard to comment on in that regard, but in my experience simply reacting first and putting fire on the target will win more often than not.

Being old and your reflexes getting slower is ok. Picking a game like Battlefield 3 over something like quake is a mistake because of age. If anything you would stand a better chance of playing an even game in quake. You will lack reflex time but can make up for it in other ways. In battlefield, and most of the current crop of FPS this is not the case. Reflex is all.

I might expand on this later, but for now this is it.