Team Fortress 2 Forum

Does anybody notice that sometimes mouse goes weird, making the game look up or down?

The wheel also does not work well. It skips a lot of step.

Can you describe your hardware and OS?

yeah, i notice it in tf2, actually a little less than in cs:s. in tf2, if i spawn in, and dont move right away, sometimes when i touch the mouse it will look up or down right away, but it never really happens in combat. also what triggers it is if i stop in mid run to type in the chat window, as soon as i move the mouse again, it looks straight up.

in css it happens at those two times and sometimes after buying a weapon. though it never happens ALL the time under these circumstances so i dont know what could exactly be causing it.

20" imac 2.4 duo, radeon 2600 hd pro. cx7

edit:the mwheelup/down thing? i notice that too. its frustrating as most times it takes 2 clicks to switch weapons. i just learned to use the numbers to switch weapons to play through it and it's made me a better player.

This is probably the MOST serious problem I have found with CX to date (and goes back to the Crossover 6.0 versions up as well from what I remember).

There is serious mouse glitching and lag to the point that the game is unplayable (seeing as FPS are depdent on mouse movement and response). It seems now that the mouse will run fine for a while then get ultra laggy, then respond again. It is not game lag though, it is mouse lag (from what I can tell).

I am having the same problem where the scroll wheel is not working much if at all.

francis wrote:

the mwheelup/down thing? i notice that too. its frustrating as most
times it takes 2 clicks to switch weapons. i just learned to use the
numbers to switch weapons to play through it and it's made me a
better player.

Here's something I wrote up for a ticket on this subject:

The issue with the scroll wheel is sort of complex. Here are some of the factors involved:

*) Not every scroll wheel has "clicks". Some, like the scroll "pea" on a Mighty Mouse, are just free-spinning and continuous.

*) In Mac OS X, the "distance" scrolled which is reported to applications is not predetermined, even for mice which do have a clicky scroll wheel. The user can control the scrolling speed in System Preferences. So, there's no way for a Mac application to know that you have rolled the wheel by 1 click.

*) The scroll speed isn't even constant. There's an acceleration curve so that you can scroll through a long document with a quick flick rather than having to spin and spin and spin.

*) CrossOver, as currently implemented, has an X11 layer between the Mac layer and the Windows layer. The X11 layer can't represent scroll distances, only scroll "events" (which correspond roughly to clicks on the wheel). So, CrossOver has to map a distance value to a single event. It does this by picking a somewhat arbitrary distance to count as a single event. (Windows can represent scroll distances, so without this intervening layer there would be a much finer-grained correspondence between Mac scroll distance and Windows scroll distance.)

You can control the distance which CrossOver uses to map to events using a hidden preference. You need to do this while CrossOver is not running. In a Terminal window, type a command like the following:
defaults write com.codeweavers.CrossOverGames ScrollWheelThreshold -int 2
(The value 2 here is just an example. The default value is 6. You can use any
value from 1 up. Lower values means that less scrolling should be required to
achieve a given result. Higher values means that more scrolling is required.)

After that, relaunch CrossOver and see if it works more to your liking.

Yes, I know what you mean. For me the responsiveness of the mouse is getting lower when the FPS go down. This also happens in other shooter games.

Any response to this by the Crossover Staff? This is an endemic problem for all games and is one of the main reasons I don't use Crossover as opposed to bootcamp (besides the tf2 "glow" or lack thereof lol!)

Low responsiveness is a natural consequence of lower framerates; That's the main reason why you want high framerates. So the issue in this case is bad performance, not a mouse problem per se. We are working hard on improving performance, but the drivers are ruining our fun ☹️

As for the mouse wheel troubles - We're aware of them, but they are rather tricky to solve.

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

Low responsiveness is a natural consequence of lower framerates;
That's the main reason why you want high framerates. So the issue in
this case is bad performance, not a mouse problem per se. We are
working hard on improving performance, but the drivers are ruining
our fun ☹️

A real Windows does not show this kind of low "responsiveness" even with low frame rates. The frame rates may go down, but I can still move the mouse as quick as when I have high frame rates. The mouse does not get slower, like in Crossover. You can't predict how much the view will turn when the FPS go down. That's a real problem. I know Crossover still has a long way to go, so thank you very much for making it better every day. :)

You mean that the turning speed behaves badly with lower framerates? I don't think I've ever seen it in a HL2 based game, but I have seen it in other games. What I meant was (obviously) that with slow framerates you see the result later.

One usual reason for bad mouse movement behavior in some games is this: Windows can return raw mouse motion data. Let's assume your resolution is 800x600 pixels, and you move the mouse 1400 pixels to the left. In this case, the app can read this. Mac and Linux don't do that. All we have is absolute positions. So we constantly move the (not shown) cursor to the middle, see where it is moved to and move it back to the middle. If this doesn't happen fast enough due to low framerates, the cursor will eventually hit the screen edge, and any further movement will be lost.

I don't know if this applies to HL2 as well, I think it does not use DirectInput. If it does, then unfortunately there is not much we can do about this.

So there is no fix for this/is never going to be a fix I take it?

It would be nice to know because if thats the case I think I may just uninstall Crossover and go back to using Bootcamp. You guys work on a great product but not being able to play an FPS game is a killer. Mouse movement is KEY in games like CS:S and TF2 and the laggyness of the mouse (even at 60-100fps, and I have a g9 so I can jack up the sensitivity on the hardware chip of the mouse itself and even then its awful) and the scroll wheel working sporadically make these games more unplayable then the graphics glitches :/

A clarification would be wonderful so people like me know whether to hold out hope or not :p

I have a fix for the scroll wheel which will be included in an upcoming release of CrossOver Games.

Regarding the mouse responsiveness: jacking up the mouse sensitivity is exactly the wrong approach. In fact, you might try reducing the tracking speed in Mac OS X, in System Preferences, and then increasing the mouse sensitivity in TF2 to compensate. The idea is that the mouse position will be less likely to move to the window/screen edge due to the reduced tracking speed. It possible that you can get an even greater effect from third-party mouse drivers like USB Overdrive, ControllerMate, or SteerMouse.

EDITED TO SAY: Although it sounds counter-intuitive, increasing the resolution at which you play the game also has the effect of making it less likely that the mouse position will hit the window/screen edge.

In the long term, we do have plans to address these problems but it requires significant development effort. On the Mac it requires a major overhaul of the internals of CrossOver. It's currently based on X11 and the limitation comes from the design of X11 rather than from the Mac OS. We have plans to move away from X11 entirely, eventually. On Linux, there's no moving away from X11, so the fix for this issue involves changes to X11 itself.

The scroll wheel should work much better in the new unsupported release of CrossOver Games.

On the other hand, I can't vouch for whether TF2 works better or worse. 😐

Ken Thomases wrote:

The scroll wheel should work much better in the new
[link=http://www.codeweavers.com/account/downloads/?_dl=unsupported]unsupported
release of CrossOver Games[/link].

On the other hand, I can't vouch for whether TF2 works better or
worse. 😐

I cant tell on the unsported version if the scroll wheel works better but the mouse lag is still awful. I understand the reason behind the lag and this seems like an inherent flaw in WINE. I am assuming this means a fix is impossible?