Who designed the !@#$ing cursor control of SEV?

[gregebowman]

Finally got my copy of SEV the other day. I was prepared to spend the sticker price of $40, but got it for half of that. Anyway, I pop it in and press the tutorial to get the feel of it. I know from reading prior posts that there were problem with the "user interface". If that meant the cursor control, they sure got that right. I even added the 1.25 patch, and I still couldn't control that darn sucker. The game is taking me 2-3 times longer to play because I keep having to move that cursor back to where I need it to go. You would think with a cursor controlled game such as this, some thought would have been given to make this better. Other than that, I'm enjoying the game. Graphics look sharp, and I love the new tech area. I just don't like the lack of cursor control.

[Suicide Junkie]

Say what?

Do you mean the cursor jumps around, or perhaps oversteering due to low framerate?

[Combat Wombat]

Are you having a problem with the cursor lagging? You may try to run the game in graphics safe mode, if I am correct that should fix your problem.

[gregebowman]

Suicide Junkie said:
Say what?

Do you mean the cursor jumps around, or perhaps oversteering due to low framerate?



It's more doing that than the other one. How do I correct this? It's driving me buggy.

[Suicide Junkie]

Well, the second is due to having a low framerate. Hardware limited... mitigated by patience and compensating by slowing down before you get to where you want to click.

The former shouldn't really happen.
Unless you're moving the mouse around while a screen is loading or something, and the processor is busy.
An outside possibility is one of the accessibility features of windows, where it will make your cursor jump to the buttons of a message box when one pops up. You could try disabling that.

[Phoenix-D]

Yeah, that's definitely a technical issue. IIRC someone over at spaceempires5.com was having the same issue, I'll see if I can find the post and if they ever fixed it.

[geoschmo]

I had serious problems with the mouse lagging and jerking when I started playing. Turning down the graphics settings definetly helped.

[Thy_Reaper]

I had severe graphics lag issues too, but I managed to fix it completely by turning Clear Type off.

Desktop Properties->Appearance->Effects

Turning off Anti-aliasing also improves frame rate for most people.

[Atrocities]

You should have seen the first version of the mouse pointer.... be very happy you got what you have now.

[Arkcon]

geoschmo said:
I had serious problems with the mouse lagging and jerking when I started playing. Turning down the graphics settings definetly helped.

Specifically which settings? I have to use safe mode with my old fashioned graphics card. I'm currently at medium background detail, and high graphic detail -- I could probably stand to lower those. I'm at 1024x768x32 resolution, should I reduce colors or would that make the game work harder and be worse?

I don't have a very jerky cursor, but it is a little unpredictable when I'm clicking. I gotta admit, this really makes me want to just put SE5 away until I get a newer, more state of the art, computer.

[geoschmo]

Arkcon said:
geoschmo said:
I had serious problems with the mouse lagging and jerking when I started playing. Turning down the graphics settings definetly helped.

Specifically which settings? I have to use safe mode with my old fashioned graphics card. I'm currently at medium background detail, and high graphic detail -- I could probably stand to lower those. I'm at 1024x768x32 resolution, should I reduce colors or would that make the game work harder and be worse?


To be honest I didn't do a lot of careful testing. I pretty much nerfed all the settings and it got better. It's still not perfect. The mouse has a little bit of lag, but it's playable. I'm working on a lap top though without a fancy video card so I'm kind of happy just that it works.

Geoschmo

[Azselendor]

Has any run SE5 under vista?

[Captain Kwok]

I know there was an issue with SE:V using a DLL that wasn't included with Vista, but that was corrected in one of the post v1.25 versions.

[gregebowman]

Ok, thanks for the input. I was able to put the graphics in safe mode, and my cursor and occassional graphics glitches cleared up. Thanks. It would have been nice if this was pointed out in teh documentation (maybe it was, but to tell the truth, I haven't really read the booklet all the way through yet). At least now I'm not trying to pull my hair out with frustration.

[Arkcon]

I reduced the graphics to low, and all my cursor problems went away. I should have realized my system was too old. Anyway, the game looks almost exactly the same, I haven't lost any detail in the planets, stars, warp points, etc. I can even enter nebula systems now, without the sound skipping. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Huh. I can't remember having any cursor problems.

[phalzyr]

If it is jumping around a lot and you don't think it is low video capabilities there is something else that I've seen cause this personally:

Mouse acceleration/control software. Specifically mouseware that comes with Logitech mice. If you have that installed or something similar and running try disabling it temporally or just plain uninstalling it if you don't use its features.