Oolite Bulletins

Dear all

Firstly I'd like to say that I appreciate the game and, thus, all the work that people here have done on it.

Now: ever since version 1.72 (I think it was - I am now on 1.73.3, and I have tried all the 'trunk' versions to date) my mouse cannot control my ship properly. For it will not move the ship in certain directions, or, sometimes, will move it in that direction only very, very slowly. Which direction is affected varies fairly quickly and somewhat randomly. Thus, in order, sometimes, to go up, I have to rotate 180 degrees and dive. It's pretty strange. The culprit does not seem to be any OXP or any other programme on my (fast Windows XP SP3, nvidia card) computer. Nor does the type of ship seem to make any difference. Keyboard control works as normal. I have tried two mice - both, though, PS/2 ones (I have a USB mouse, but I haven't tried it because I'd need an expansion cord to use it properly). Please help! Thank you.

Bug confirmed. No idea why it happens at the moment, we are looking into it.

Hello UK_Eliter, and welcome to the boards!


(While you're looking for that bug a_c... passing along a request from a friend.. he wants to know if it would be possible to set up a mouse configuration screen like there is for joysticks? Seems to me it would be a good idea..)

Dear Diziet, dear another_commander

Thanks!

Er, that's it.

Yours

Nick (that's my actual name).

This should now be fixed with revisions 2498/2499. Testing will be needed of course.

Diziet Sma: There are no current plans for adding more configuration screens at this stage that I am aware of.

Dear all

The mouse control does now seem to work. Thank you! A speedily-provided fix. I wonder what the problem was (if I'd understand the answer). .

Yours

Nick

UK_Eliter wrote:

I wonder what the problem was (if I'd understand the answer).

To visualize the problem, imagine that the mouse cursor is visible on your screen while you are controlling your ship.

You start with the mouse centered on screen. You start pitching up by moving the mouse down. Your mouse cursor starts moving towards the lower edge of the screen while your ship starts accelerating upwards. Now you right-click the mouse to center the virtual joystick (which is the mouse itself) and the pitch/roll cursors. The ship stops moving and the two cursors are centered as the virtual joystick coordinates are zeroed. But the mouse cursor itself is still near the lower edge of your screen. Now, you continue moving the mouse down so that you carry on pitching up. What happens is that your mouse cursor now arrives at the bottom of the screen and stops there. Your pitch cursor has moved and you are pitching, but since there is no more room left for the mouse cursor to move futher down, it appears as if your mouse control has stopped responding. That was the problem you were experiencing and, because it obviously depends on the initial position of the mouse cursor on the screen, sometimes it seemed to work, some others seemed to work less and sometimes it seemed to not work at all and it was very difficult to find a pattern.

The solution is that now we are physically re-centering the mouse cursor coordinates when you right-click, together with the virtual joystick coordinates. This way we can ensure that the mouse cursor has always enough space to move about doing its business.

Aha. I thought that the problem might be along those lines. Thanks for telling me. You might like to note, though, that in fact I've only just learnt about 'right-clickability' and have not been doing any right-clicking. Nonethless, as I said, control does seem now to work.