Something weird happened for me since yesterday so I thought to ask here since I couldn't find the answer. I play Nexuiz for many months now and so far it went well on most servers but since yesterday I seem to be unable to hit anyone any more. I opened a test match with a bot to test what was happening and I had to shoot after the bot 70 times before I could kill it (only hitting him 5 or 6 times in total) with different guns, while on servers most players can shoot 2 times and kill someone. The problem is I can't orient my mouse correctly towards the person I want to shoot while moving (and while the user is moving too) but till yesterday it used to work well so I can't understand what happened.

I didn't modify many things since it started happening except the mouse sensitivity and probably the crosshair. This is a screenshot of how I have my HUD and crosshair arranged like. I tried mouse sensitivities from 5.0 to 7.5 with and without the Mouse Filter setting but none made things better. I also didn't change my keys nor my gaming style and just play like always (using W S A D to move and mouse to look around and shoot, Windows version).

Does anyone know if something server-side could have changed or happened that caused this? I do remember downloading some patches which some servers I joined gave my client to download but that shouldn't change any such defaults normally. Also, whats the best mouse sensitivity and crosshair to use to be able to hit easily for that matter? Thanks.

Mouse sensitivity varies from system to system. Mice are different, graphical environments have different setups, some have broken mouse acceleration so the actual value isn't worth comparing with other people.

I always use crosshair 1. If you are going to drill a hole you never mark it with a point, you mark it with a cross.

Sometimes you might just be having a bad day. Personally I get cat hair in my mouse a lot which really ruins it causing the crosshair to not move and worse. Anyone who sees me on servers will testify to this

Anyway what Ed said was spot on, theres a lot of variables.

Each times I change my sensivity, even less than 0.5. I need about one week to get used with it.
Sometimes, when I suck well with my new sens, I undo change.
With my razer DA, I have all the WindowsXP mouse acceleration off and mouse driver sens is at Max. I set my sens with nexuiz. Its the best to get no mouse acceleration/strange thing.
Good luck

Qz

There's some default keybind for changing the FOV, which also could cause a completely different aiming. Happened to me several times, until I write-protected my config.cfg.

*laughs* I think I finally discovered what was causing me to be unable to hit and aim correctly; In my thirst for perfect looks and and maximum effects I turned a bit too many rendering details on which lowered my fps a little bit. I thought my FPS was round enough but when I turned down some details I seen it was more round and fast. After that I noticed I could aim more correctly and hit like I wasn't able to before.

So a note to other players to spare them of this torture; Don't enable more visual effects then what you can keep under a perfect FPS. If your framerate decreases even a bit it becomes much harder to play and you'll end up wondering why everyone on every server plays godlike while you can't hit anything

Well a lot of players lower they effect to zero just to be able to aim and see and hit better If thought their PC might handle the effects well

esteel wrote:Well a lot of players lower they effect to zero just to be able to aim and see and hit better

Or so they think. I'm convinced that the 'I must have 5000 FPS, I play sooooooooo much worse with any less' mentality is entirely made up in peoples own heads. Without any kind of FPS counter they wouldn't be moaning about 40 fps. Guaranteed.

A TFT monitor can only display at 60Hz, so anything over that is entirely irrelevant and you should enable v_sync to prevent tearing. Unless of course your graphics drivers source code was cobbled together from old newspaper cuttings and can't do triple buffering in which case you most likely won't be achieving that kind of framerate anyway.

There is also the other side to it of people lowering the settings unreasonably with gl_picmip values so high that everything is nigh-on flat shaded which verges on cheating.

Ed wrote:Or so they think. I'm convinced that the 'I must have 5000 FPS, I play sooooooooo much worse with any less' mentality is entirely made up in peoples own heads. Without any kind of FPS counter they wouldn't be moaning about 40 fps. Guaranteed.

A TFT monitor can only display at 60Hz, so anything over that is entirely irrelevant and you should enable v_sync to prevent tearing. Unless of course your graphics drivers source code was cobbled together from old newspaper cuttings and can't do triple buffering in which case you most likely won't be achieving that kind of framerate anyway.

There is also the other side to it of people lowering the settings unreasonably with gl_picmip values so high that everything is nigh-on flat shaded which verges on cheating.

I don't have and never had that mentality so far. The only reason I like having a high FPS is because I just feel more comfortable having the game run at a smooth level and well... everyone feels better having the highest framerate they can get. I didn't even know until today it can decrease your playing performance that easily unless your FPS is really really low.

My PC supports enough details in Nexuiz to run really smoothly. Only things I couldn't enable where the world lightning and the shadows and also some shiny mapping of sorts for helping create more of that 3D effect on textures (which I may also mention is one of the most awesome effects I seen... the latest Quake engine is more amazing then many engines even of commercial gaming these days).

You can make a bench with Nexuiz to test your config.
I think its : 'timedemo demoname.dem" in console. That will write a log file.

For me, minimum FPS is 60.
To have a good feeling of fluidity, minimum FPS is 25. But for a perfect response of your actions, 60 is good.
I agree that if you got 60 in minimum, max is about 500/600. Totaly useless. I block it to 333.

Some people still have CRT monitors with 100Hz freq.

Alien wrote:Some people still have CRT monitors with 100Hz freq.

Some people have CRT monitors with 120Hz frequency, however CRT's display images differently and use 2 clock cycles to do so. Therefore a 100Hz refresh rate actually means only 50 fps to the eye.

Ok, so having framerate of 100 won't help me. I'll know that.

Ed wrote:

esteel wrote:Well a lot of players lower they effect to zero just to be able to aim and see and hit better

Or so they think. I'm convinced that the 'I must have 5000 FPS, I play sooooooooo much worse with any less' mentality is entirely made up in peoples own heads. Without any kind of FPS counter they wouldn't be moaning about 40 fps. Guaranteed.

A TFT monitor can only display at 60Hz, so anything over that is entirely irrelevant and you should enable v_sync to prevent tearing. Unless of course your graphics drivers source code was cobbled together from old newspaper cuttings and can't do triple buffering in which case you most likely won't be achieving that kind of framerate anyway.

There is also the other side to it of people lowering the settings unreasonably with gl_picmip values so high that everything is nigh-on flat shaded which verges on cheating.

that's bs in my opinion (no offense), sorry.

there are several things you can feel:
a) FPS drops like drops from 500 to 150 fps. it is noticable and disturbing
b) having higher FPS on my TFT improved the image quality by A LOT (when NOT using vsync). I've played for years with vsync disabled and FPS limited to 130 (because I had a weak graphics card that could only give me stable 130 FPS) and when I upgraded my PC to a GeForce 8800 (with which I have constant 500 FPS most of the time) I could see a visual difference of the image once I set cl_maxfps to 500 compared to the old 130, it seems as if the tears (which affect certain areas of the TFT screen) got smaller (i.e. the areas affected became smaller, the disturbing .. dunno .. stripes .. became smaller).
c) having 60 fps is smooth for the eye, but not smooth for the feeling of how fast your actions done with your mouse/keyboard become visual on your screen. Having 60 fps causes you to have some lag between your actions until it is shown. I've tried that myself. So for your visitor it may look fluently, but it doesn't feel that great when playing by yourself. Please note that I am currently talking about the kind of 60fps you get because the graphics card can't do more, it's a different thing when your FPS are artificially limited .. in this case the image quality just is bad (for TFTs). The other possibility is to use vsync. The exception with vsync is: image quality is good, because the image doesn't have any tears. But it is having horrible input lag. Well, horrible is relative, depends on the machine, the OS, and the person who sits in front of it and the conditions this person has already been exposed to. A person who has played with a crappy 50-60 FPS PC will think it is fluent and that the actions done by his keyboard/mouse are fluently transferred to screen. If you would let this person use my PC for a week and then let it use his own PC again, you'd hear him/her whining all day. Trust me.

GreEn`mArine wrote:a) FPS drops like drops from 500 to 150 fps. it is noticable and disturbing

You are not noticing the FPS falling to 150. The FPS counter does not work on a single frame by single frame basis. If it's suddenly dropped to saying 150, it's quite likely that what is upsetting you so much is the 10 frames in one second which took perhaps > 50ms to render. The other frames may only take 2ms but the average is irrelevantly high and it is only that short slow bit that you notice, which is not running at 150fps but much lower. If you were to somehow log frame by frame with 6 digit precision, you could see this.

GreEn`mArine wrote:b) having higher FPS on my TFT improved the image quality by A LOT (when NOT using vsync). I've played for years with vsync disabled and FPS limited to 130 (because I had a weak graphics card that could only give me stable 130 FPS) and when I upgraded my PC to a GeForce 8800 (with which I have constant 500 FPS most of the time) I could see a visual difference of the image once I set cl_maxfps to 500 compared to the old 130, it seems as if the tears (which affect certain areas of the TFT screen) got smaller (i.e. the areas affected became smaller, the disturbing .. dunno .. stripes .. became smaller).

The tearing became less for the simple reason that the interval between the two frames forming the tear would have been smaller and hence there was less visual difference in the frames. In no way did the tearing stop though, in fact there would have been more of it it's just that you would have been much less likely to notice as I've explained.

GreEn`mArine wrote:The exception with vsync is: image quality is good, because the image doesn't have any tears. But it is having horrible input lag.

I have never had a problem with input lag from v_sync or cl_maxfps. This can not be a graphical problem though. I wonder if there is some kind of test that can be done to determine whether any of these factors make any difference or not? A persons reaction times will be so much slower that it may make the time from frame to frame irrelevant.

I've come across a similar thing in my work as a medical engineer with electrophysiology systems that display intracardiac signals in real time on a set of monitors for a doctor to view during a cardiac catheterisation. On certain sweep rates there would be awful tearing and blurring on a lot of systems which could be very distracting to the doctor. The manufacturers said it was because of the limited bandwidth going to the monitors which I refuted and after hooking up a set of different monitors it looked fine. All it was was the response characteristics of the Eizo monitors in use which may have an 8ms refresh rate but still aren't very good for moving images as they're aimed at CAD use.

I'm not quite sure about this but while I had my monitor set at 60hz (LCD) when the game went up to 75 fps and dropped back to 60 I did get the impression that it was noticeable somehow, even if 60 was also the refresh rate of the monitor. I'm not sure and it could have just seemed that way to me but maybe there is a tiny little improvement even if fps > refresh rate. Either way even if there is it's certainly not something to get an obsession for... I'm pretty well with an average of 50-60 fps