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Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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

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.

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