Chocolate Doom mouse settings

I need some help getting my mouse settings in ChocoDoom to work to my preference, so I'll ask you guys what yours' are.

I've used ZDoom at 1.0 sensitivity (though it's marked as 1.5 in the config document, weird, I guess considering 0.5 is the default) with prescaling on but NOT smoothing for many, many hundreds of hours (estimated), and I'd like to know if there's any way I can emulate that with ChocoDoom.

The three setting toggles confuse me much. I've played around with it and found out what "acceleration" and "acceleration threshold" mean in terms of gameplay, but am still unable to make them work best for me.

Default settings feel very stiff and waaaaay too slow.

Help?

I use this:

Speed: 24
Acceleration: 1.7
Acceleration threshold: 10

I don't think I've played with the latter two.

I've been meaning to write this up properly for a while because it's slightly complicated. I'll do my best to explain, if you still don't understand then please say and I'll do my best to clarify.

There are three settings: mouse speed, acceleration and acceleration threshold. When you move your mouse, the amount you move the mouse is multiplied by the mouse speed. So, if you double the mouse speed value, it should move at twice the speed. The complicated part is the acceleration.

When you're playing an FPS, you sometimes want precise aiming, and sometimes want to make large movements. If a monster started shooting at you from behind, you'd want to move the mouse fast to turn round quickly, for example. The problem is that these are conflicting requirements: you could increase the mouse speed to allow yourself to make quick turns with a small movement of the mouse, but then you'd lose the precision you need to do precise aiming.

What acceleration does is apply an extra speed-up when you make quick turns. When the speed you're moving the mouse exceeds the threshold, the acceleration factor is applied. So if the acceleration was 2.0, for example, the amount you move when you exceed the threshold counts for twice what it does below the threshold. Setting acceleration to 1.0 effectively "disables" acceleration.

The setup tool has an option to help you configure the threshold and acceleration to your comfort. If you go into the "configure mouse" dialog, there's a button to test your settings at the bottom of the window. It launches Doom and shows a "thermometer" type bar that shows how fast you're moving the mouse. There's a vertical bar that shows the acceleration threshold, so that you can see when you're exceeding it.

I think I use 34 Speed and 1.7 acceleration, and vertical mouse movement disabled.

Viewtiful-Chris said:

Default settings feel very stiff and waaaaay too slow.

Simple answer: Use the GDI renderer instead of Direct X.

The Direct X renderer is affected by one of Windows' mouse settings - "Enhance pointer precision" in the mouse properties will make the mouse annoyingly slow. You can turn it off, but the mouse is noticeably harder to control in Windows without it. The GDI renderer is not affected by that setting. (This isn't just an issue with Chocolate Doom, DOSBox is also affected by it, probably other things that use SDL.)

Thanks for the info fraggle!

Before we continue discussing in-game mouse settings I want to make the point that mouse hardware as well as mouse settings in Windows can play a significant factor in those in-game numbers. Please, anyone, correct me if I am wrong or add any info I might have missed. Maybe Choco or ZDoom bypass some of these things I mention as I learned about most of this for Quake III and the first two Call of Duty games.

A mouse's hardware sensitivity is often referred to as CPI or DPI. I have a wireless optical mouse that is capable of 800 or 1600. If my mouse is set to 800 and my in-game sensitivity is 10 then doubling my hardware sensitivity to 1600 would require that I halve my in-game sensitivity to 5 for the same results as before. Logic would say that a higher hardware sensitivity and a lower in-game “manipulation” of that sensitivity is generally best but I don't really see it in PrBoom-Plus (because of Doom's turning resolution?) which was the last time I really tested everything although I can say that I feel the difference in Quake/III and Call of Duty 1 & 2 as well as newer games.

Also, unless a game uses DirectInput it's mouse sensitivity will be affected by the Windows mouse speed in the Mouse Properties/Pointer Options tab. There are 11 notches and 6 is the default in XP/Vista and it is often best left alone as increasing it will lose precision and decreasing it will add precision though possibly add some form of deceleration or something. So I've heard.

If I may add to what Dragonsbrethren said. Enhance pointer precision = Windows mouse 'acceleration'. I like the acceleration well enough for programs but not for games so I disable it and use a CPI that feels good at my desktop resolution. My understanding is that many (all?) newer games respect this setting however Win9x games have a quirk that may actually ignore or re-enable acceleration while they are running. In the past I have used a registry tweak that modify the acceleration values to disable them completely although that is a bit extreme for most people.

Finally as more of a note for games. The screen resolution will also be a factor in how sensitive the mouse feels/acts. If you normally play at 640x480 and then jump to 1920x1200 it will feel slow/low without options like “Prescale mouse movement” or pixel doubling like Choco's renderer.

I'll mention my settings though understand that they probably wont help since I don't really try to make Choco and ZDoom feel the same. I do not like acceleration and my research indicates that I like a high mouse sensitivity comparatively.

Currently my mouse is set to 800 and Windows mouse speed is default at 6.

My Doom/Choco Doom configs
mouse_sensitivity 75
mouse_acceleration 1.000000
mouse_threshold 0 <--- Seems I was right that this had no affect if acceleration is set to 1.

My ZDoom is set to 640x480 and the menu settings are
Overall = 1.8
Prescale = Yes
Smooth = No
Turning 1.0
Mouselook = 1.0
For/back = 0.0
Strafing = 2.0