You can adjust them independently because your monitor's width and height are different. Someone may want to be able to flick their mouse to the left and right edges of the monitor in the same time frame they can flick it to the top and bottom, or vice verse if the monitor is rotated. It's probably useful in fps or with ultrawide/span monitor setups.
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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Also because looking up and down may be more or less important than looking side-to-side.
360 degrees left/right Maybe 90 degrees up/down
Except maybe for a flight sim where I could imagine looking down would be even more important than side to side
An airplane’s windows don’t allow looking up or down, if we’re taking cockpits without canopies.
It’s probably useful in fps or with ultrawide/span monitor setups.
That might be the case, but I still think it would just give me motion sickness. That's what has happened, every time I've accidentally had one axis set to a larger value than the other. It just makes me feel like my hands and eyes are disconnected.
But if some people dig it, that's cool.
Me. The vertical is slightly lower than the horizontal. Means I turn fast but stay more on the horizon. Probably a habit from FPS where targets are pretty much on the same level as you.
As long as your character is oriented in a vertical way, there’s twice as much horizontal breadth to cover as vertical.
In other words, you can turn in a full circle but you can’t rotate up or down in a full circle.
The more people mention this, the more I'm almost starting to continue trying it. If you really get used to it, it probably does make it easier to adjust the Y axis for headshots, while you're turning through the X axis. Basically, if you have to cover more Y axis space on the mousepad to adjust the same amount of Y pixels on the screen, you'd theoretically be less likely to move too much in that axis, and overshoot where you want to place the crosshairs.
On the other hand, I've been using the same values for X and Y for decades. There's a lot of accumulated muscle memory to reprogram.
Now I wonder how many pro FPS players play with different X and Y settings...
Don't try it. You will regret it when you play the 90% of games that don't let you set both.
Wisdom.
I really think it’s a matter of preference. I also invert-Y
I think I would actually lose my mind, trying to switch to inverted Y. Have you always rolled like that?
Yeah. Too much flight simulator I guess. Forward is dive. Back is pull up.
Weird Crew reporting in, running up to you using ESDF. 😅
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.
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.
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.
I think depending on what type of grip you use on your mouse, it might change what sensitivity you want to use. It's easy to cover wider distances with your wrist moving left-right, but harder to cover the same distance using your fingers to move up-down.
That's a really good point. I'm a full-palm-grip sort of mouse user, where I only use the fingers to click, and all the movement come from the arm itself. I suspect that means I'd get less utility out of changing the axis values.
I don't usually change the Y sensitivity, but I use a grip sort of halfway between a palm and fingertip grip, where I use my fingers for smaller movements, and my wrist for larger ones, so I can definitely see why some would want to.
I love having these as separate options and I use them every time to increase the X axis sensitivity because that's where I will be moving the most drastically and I don't need the same rapid acceleration for minor Y axis adjustments.
I've never tried it deliberately, but every time I've accidentally set the X and Y to different values, it has just destroyed my accuracy and made me motion-sick, into the bargain.
But I guess you could get used to it, and then it could give some kind of objective advantage.
If you're asking why the games' options are like that, it could be so the console and PC versions can be as similar as possible. As people have mentioned, it makes more sense on a controller, with a thumbstick, to set both axes to different sensitivities. PC / mouse version probably just mirrors these config options.
Also I have to say I can't think of a game that does this off the top of my head, but when it comes to shooters I've mainly played older PC games, before the PS3 era. I think only setting sensitivity as a single value is common in those games.
As I've said to a couple of people, I definitely have seen people set different X and Y settings on joysticks/thumbsticks/tilt-controls. I'm specifically talking about the mouse version, which I've never actually encountered anybody using, up until the testimony of these people, in this thread.
And yeah, my experience is the same as yours. It's only been in the last six or seven years that I've really started to see games include options to set individual axis controls for the mouse.
In those most current years, though, it has been a very common option. The majority of medium-to-AAA budgeted games include the option. I did figure that meant some people were using it. I just wondered how common it really was. I'd never considered trying it myself, deliberately, until now.
First time I've ever set them differently was just recently, playing Sniper Elite 5 on PS4, with a controller. The default settings just felt so wildly high. I lowered them equally, but the vertical still felt too fast. So I lowered the vertical further.
controller
Why do so many people keep responding with comments about controllers???
I am exclusively talking about mouse settings. Was that somehow not clear? I mean, I never said anything about controllers.
I'm not mad, I'm just really REALLY confused.
I use it to help with aiming in fps games
I've been playing FPS games since Wolfenstein 3D (and most people didn't even use the mouse for those very early FPSes), and I have never considered trying that. As I said to a couple other people, I've accidentally set the X and Y to different values, and it just destroys my ability to aim.
But, ya know, I haven't practiced it. It could offer an objective advantage, of some kind.
At any rate, I'm just glad there are people using it. It would be weird if it was a very common option in modern games, with nobody putting it to use, at all.
I have used them, mainly FPS games. I also have built in functionality to change my mouse sensitivity in my mouse. There's a "sniper mode" button as well that will change the sensitivity whilst the button is pressed to allow me to be more precise (not that I use that as I don't play many games like that)
I used the separate x and y options when I was using a tracker ball once. It went slower vertical than it did horizontally so being able to change them individually was a huge help.
Other people that might make use of this feature (and perhaps even render a game unplayable without it) is disabled people, I don't have experience here, but it's not hard to imagine use cases, poor hand mobility, limited reach etc.
All the time. Depending on the device and the output. I don't want to scroll depending on if it's my work or gaming computer in certain situations.
On controller, I usually set my horizontal sensitivity higher than vertical. There’s only 180 degrees of up and down but 360 degrees of left and right to navigate in the world.
controller
And another response about controllers. I just checked my post again, and I literally didn't mention ANYTHING about controllers.
I don't mind talking about controllers, but I'm genuinely curious. Why are so many people mentioning controllers, when I was only talking about mouse controls?