Speed Sensitive Mouse

The one thing I noticed about OS X is the mouse is speed senstive. As you increase the speed of the mouse across the mouse pad, the mouse pointer on the screen accelerates out of proportion. Long time Mac users probably don't notice this.

This is the only feature that I've found that prohibits good FPS gaming on the system. I understand this is probably done for sensitive design work, but is there any way to change this? I don't see any options from within the OS...maybe some sort of utility?

The Mac speed settings seem to suit most Mac users but most 3rd party mice can use their own drivers which could give you the option to change it. My MacMice rodent has pretty comprehensive settings available through the System preferences menu from the downloaded drivers.

Avid6eek said:

The one thing I noticed about OS X is the mouse is speed senstive. As you increase the speed of the mouse across the mouse pad, the mouse pointer on the screen accelerates out of proportion. Long time Mac users probably don't notice this.

This is the only feature that I've found that prohibits good FPS gaming on the system. I understand this is probably done for sensitive design work, but is there any way to change this? I don't see any options from within the OS...maybe some sort of utility?

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in system preferences you can adjust the mouse tracking speed, if that's what you want.

I've already found that, and played with that. I was refering to the rate at which the pointer picks up in speed compared to the rate at which you are moving the mouse across the mouse pad.

For example.... On a windows system, if you place the pointer at the end of the screen, and move your mouse over 2" really slowly, the pointer ends up in the middle of the screen. If you put the pointer back to the end, and move your mouse over 2" quickly, it ends up in the middle of the screen.

On the mac...if you do the same thing with the mouse very slowly...the pointer will only move a little ways from the end of the screen. If you do it very fast, the curser moves all the way across the screen.

The problem I'm having is that in a game, in the heat of battle you start moving around quickly. I'm trying to aim my weapon really fast, I end up spinning around. Hope those examples let you know what I'm refering to. It may be something I'll have to try to get used to.

Try this. Seems to work for what you want.

http://homepage.mac.com/bhines/mousezoom.html

or check here:

http://lists.apple.com/archives/mac-games-dev/2004/Nov/msg00091.html

Thanks for the help dan....I'll try the first one. I'm not even sure what the second one is refering to, so I'll leave that one alone for now.

For anyone else looking to turn off mouse acceleration, I have found USB Overdrive to work very well.

With increasing frequency, it appears that everything for a Mac costs money. This utility is Shareware, and will run you $20 if you want to get rid of the annoying add when you launch it to make changes. Since you should have to just set this once, I don't think it will get annoying enough to make me pay for it...

http://www.senlick.com/macsw/overdrive.html

Avid6eek said:

With increasing frequency, it appears that everything for a Mac costs money.

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Cause, you know - you'd never think that people should actually be *paid* for their efforts. That's a ridiculous idea.

meltbanana314 said:

Cause, you know - you'd never think that people should actually be *paid* for their efforts. That's a ridiculous idea.

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Not everything is about making money. If you enjoy programing, and you could make a utility that benifits people, why not just write it, and let people download it....I guess that must be a PC thing.

No..That's not just a Pc thing, however, that is something that not everyone does. My personal opinion is that the best software is always the software that was written to benefit the community, not to put dinner on the table.

ApplejustWorks said:

No..That's not just a Pc thing, however, that is something that not everyone does. My personal opinion is that the best software is always the software that was written to benefit the community, not to put dinner on the table.

Click to expand...

I agree. People who love what they are doing do it for free.

Take a look in Users/<you>/Library/Preferences/ and you should find a file called com.apple.universalaccess.plist , double click on it and you will discover Mac OS X's "registry". Should make any Windoze user feel right at home.

I'm sat in front of Jaguar and it doesn't have an option to enable/disable proportional mouse speed but Panther might (in fact until I read this thread I didn't realise that Panther behaved differently, I've always preferred the proportional way so it probably explains why I prefer playing in the PowerMac yet my son, who is more used to the Playstation and PC, prefers the iMac). I'll take a look when I'm next on my PowerMac.

btw, the plist files may only be created when you actually set various preferences, as firts installed I think the system defaults are used so you may need to go into prefferences first and adjust something to create a plist file.

The plist files are XML and every application on your system should create them in the location given above so you can sometimes discover options in them that don't appear on preference menus, just like for MS registry in fact.

When you are developing your own software you can examine the settings of any application or system service from within your own software very easily.

If you want to get real down and dirty there is probably a way of disabling it from the terminal as well.

Amen-Moses

Thanks for the info. I'll have to look into it sometime. Right now the utility I downloaded is doing the job, so there is no need to get messing with the registry.