I've never met anyone who does this. I've never HEARD of anyone who does this. I cannot think of any possible reason WHY anyone would want to do this.

So why is it an option in so many games?

Why do so many games not even offer the option to change the X and Y sensitivity together? For a LOT of games, you have to set both X and Y independently, and make sure that you set them to the same value.

When you can just type in a number, or you can click increase/decrease buttons to advance the numbers, that's fine. But there are some games where it's just sliders, and you have to oh-so-carefully drag each slider, until the readout (which often goes to three digits after the zero) is where you want it.

It's not a huge problem, but I'm just asking: is there even anybody out there, who really wants to have different sensitivities, on each axis?

I'm not judging. I'm just really, really curious.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Never seen anyone change it for the mouse, but I think for a joystick and especially gyro it is more common to have them different. Same basic principal applies to all three inputs though.

In first person games the distance you need to move horizontally is often far more then the distance you need to move vertically, quite often only needing to look up/down a small amount. So you can get better accuracy in the vertical direction by turning down the sensitivity without sacrificing the ability to move quickly up and down. But in the horizontal direction being able to move quickly is generally more important than better accuracy.

Not sure how important the difference is for the mouse though, likely why people don't use it. But it is an easy setting to split up for the developers so why not give players control over it and set it however they like? Would be nice if you could lock them together, but that is a little more complex and requires more thought to do. And I don't see game devs giving that much thought about the minor user experience improvements in their games settings when they have a load of gameplay still to worry about.

[–] nezbyte 2 points 7 months ago

Since you mentioned joysticks, Joystick Gremlin is a great piece of software if you want to take the customization up a notch and have full sensitivity curves for your joysticks. You can even have modes dedicated to landing vs normal flight at different sensitivity levels.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I've definitely seen people use different X and Y settings, on all kinds of different joystick-style deices. I've even occasionally set different X and Y values on those, myself.

I'm specifically talking about the mouse situation.

Would be nice if you could lock them together, but that is a little more complex and requires more thought to do

I think the reverse is true. Up until a few years ago, it was VERY rare to see any games (or any other apps) give users separated control over each axis, for the mouse. Back in the day, there wasn't ALWAYS even a GUI-enabled setting for sensitivity, at all. You'd just type a console command, and it would adjust the overall mouse sensitivity, which would be applied to both the X and Y.

I'm sure there were some of those games, where you could indeed use a different console command to change each axis, separately.

At any rate, once you've implemented a setting in the graphical user interface menu system for changing the X and Y, it technically would involve a bit more effort to provide an option to lock them together, so I don't mind just adjusting X and Y to the same values, myself.

I was just curious whether anyone out there actually is setting their horizontal and vertical mouse movement to different values, at all, or if it's just an option with nobody making use of it.