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Comment by ivarious | Hacker News Reader

I think the reason that using mouse is more precise is not because of its shape, but because we use at least all of our palm to use it while with controllers you only have one thumb to connect the stick with your body.

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I disagree. I think the reason is more fundamental: with a mouse, you're doing a direct translation (distance in pad → distance on screen), while with a gamepad you're doing an indirect translation (distance in stick → velocity in screen).

This is harder, because you're essentially forced to calculate (in a low conscious way, of course) distance/speed to know for how much time you should turn the stick.

> I think the reason is more fundamental: with a mouse, you're doing a direct translation (distance in pad → distance on screen), while with a gamepad you're doing an indirect translation (distance in stick → velocity in screen).

There's no fundamental reason this has to be the case, of course; if the developer wanted to, they could use stick input as position rather than velocity. Conceptually, this is no different than using a high resolution trackball.

You're correct. I guess this is why I speculate that the new trackpads uncomfortable with action/platforming games, since in those games, you move your character and dictate their speed (velocity plus direction), not pointing their position.

We'll see of course, and since the controller will be "hackable" I think there will be many way to use the controller for many types of games.

Edit for spelling

This isn't true. With a mouse you have acceleration settings that greatly change how distance works. Flick your mouse up quick vs slowly move it and measure how much distance you've moved your mouse relative to where your mouse moved to on the screen.

For any high-dpi mouse this is not useful and not used even in ordinary windows/mac mode (is it really turned on by default? ugh..); and I've never seen it used in games.

A lot of games have acceleration turned off, so you don't see what you're describing in such games.

If that were the case, one would expect that the trackball only would be as accurate as the controller and less accurate than the mouse. However, my anecdotal experience is that the trackball is as accurate, if not more so, than the mouse, despite only using the thumb.

My suspicion is that the difference is more of a calculus problem. Moving my thumb on the trackball by a given amount changes my position by a proportional amount. On the other hand, for most games, moving my thumb on the stick by a given amount changes my velocity by a proportional amount. To put it differently, if I'm aimed at a stationary target with my trackball, I remain aimed until as long as I don't move my thumb. With a stick, if I'm aimed at a stationary target and don't move my thumb, I'll keep turning at a constant rate.

I use Apple trackpad since they launched it and is more precise than anything I had used before(lots of mouses).

Like the first expensive optical mouses, trackpads will get more and more resolution and get cheaper and cheaper.

That's nice. To you play competitive FPS on it?

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