Celestia Forums

Is it possible through some option to change the cursor/crosshair behavior to not stay where it was upon dragging and releasing? I can barely use Celestia because of this because it's too much of a muscle memory change and becomes distracting/annoying very quickly. It's a terrific program, but this really ruins the experience.

(Come to think of it, this is XP I'm using - I think the Linux version at some point didn't do this, but I don't remember how long ago I tried that)

Jeffe wrote:I can barely use Celestia because of this because it's too much of a muscle memory change and becomes distracting/annoying very quickly.
...

Is this because you are disabled in some way?

Bye Fridger

No, it's because every other program in existence acts the way I describe. It's a kind of combination of "muscle memory" (look it up) and Fitt's Law.

Try raising or lowering your mouse acceleration in the control panel a large amount and see how easy it is for you to use the mouse at first. You'll subconsciously expect to move a certain amount to reach something like the address bar of a web browser, and severely under/overshoot the target.

Jeffe wrote:No, it's because every other program in existence acts the way I describe. It's a kind of combination of "muscle memory" (look it up) and Fitt's Law.

I've used a lot of other programs and have had no trouble adapting to Celestia.

However, I think I do see what you mean. If you rotate the view around (left click, move mouse) the cursor isn't centred on the screen after you stop moving (which is what you might expect, and probably more sensible too), it's still located wherever you first clicked the mouse on the screen.

I can see how that might be annoying and counter-intuitive actually, though honestly I can't say I noticed it til you mentioned it...

I personally think that it's best the way it is. When I rotate/scroll in Celestia, it tends to be a large amount. If it didn't stay where I 1st clicked, my mouse would probably end up on one of my secondary moniters. Now that would be distracting/annoying, imo.

Johaen wrote:I personally think that it's best the way it is. When I rotate/scroll in Celestia, it tends to be a large amount. If it didn't stay where I 1st clicked, my mouse would probably end up on one of my secondary moniters. Now that would be distracting/annoying, imo.

The cursor could just as easily move to middle of the monitor though - i.e. in the direction that you're now looking. That would actually make a bit more sense.

I think we have definitely more urgent things to look into...

Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote:I think we have definitely more urgent things to look into...

Depends how urgent you think usability is, I guess.

I still don't understand what's supposed to be wrong with the cursor (at least under Linux). When I move the screen with the mouse (drag pushing mouse Left) or rotate it (drag pushing mouse right), the cursor cross remains at the place where I finished dragging. That seems perfectly fine, since I might want to go on dragging thereafter from the point where the cross was last.

Maybe he is having the lag problem that I have. It used to be that I could grab an object, planet and the shuch and turn and twist it anyway I wanted. But in the last few builds I found that I have to click and grab at the objects a few times before Celestia does what I want it to do, and then it often exagerates my movements all out of proportion. Sending the object off somewhere I didn't want it to go. It really is bothersome. I have actualy cut way back in even launching and using Celestia for anything more than to test a texture. It jsut doesn't work the way it used to. I still have an old 1.2 build of Celestia left over from almost 3 years ago and it works just fine and the way I want it to. Go figure. Something is definetly amisss here.

Just my 2 cents.

Don. Edwards

t00fri wrote:I still don't understand what's supposed to be wrong with the cursor (at least under Linux).

That's because I made it behave logically

Seriously, I just can't bare the way it behaves under Windows. You constantly have to lift your mouse to bring it back to its normal work area. It's like those applications which automatically move the cursor over the default button, it annoys the hell out of me.

And well, nobody as yet asked for this behavior to be implemented on the linux frontends, there's probably a reason for it.

Christophe wrote:

t00fri wrote:I still don't understand what's supposed to be wrong with the cursor (at least under Linux).

That's because I made it behave logically

Seriously, I just can't bare the way it behaves under Windows. You constantly have to lift your mouse to bring it back to its normal work area. It's like those applications which automatically move the cursor over the default button, it annoys the hell out of me.

And well, nobody as yet asked for this behavior to be implemented on the linux frontends, there's probably a reason for it.

Ha! I knew it

Cheers,
Fridger

I use the keyboard mostly....

But that?€™s my point. It didn't used to be this way. Something has changed since we went into the latest builds that has changed the way the cursor and Celestia work together under Windows. As I said it is to the point that I am hardly using it anymore. Luckily I can still test my textures in the old install. But at this point I have almost totally given up on the new builds. Another reason I have been slow to release anything of late. It is just getting to be a pain in the butt to test anything. If I am having this much trouble with a decent system I can just imagine what things others are going through with lesser computers or knowledge of Celestia. I am sure this has made many users give up on it. I know I am getting close!

Don. Edwards

To be quite honest, I don't have any trouble like you are describing Don. Now, I'll be honest, my experiance with Celestia begain with 1.4, so the current cursor behavior is all I've ever known. But even with that, it seems to be fairly responsive. When I move Mars up and down, it moves up and down, nice and smooth, when I make it rotate, it rotates smoothly. The only hicups are when it loads a texture, which is expected. The only time I would say it acts "laggy" is when I turn up the star count/magnitude, or when I look at one of the crazy fictional add-ons, like the one with a bunch of Wubs and stuff. But with my crappy, PC, I also expect this. When ever I am working with "normal things", like the planets, and stuff, it works perfectly smooth, for being at 10-15 fps.

Now, I do have one situation where Celestia seems to be 'unresponsive'. Sometimes when I right-click on a body to change to an alternate texture, or something like that, it sometimes seems to take a few tries to make the little menu pop up.

But as for any sort of normal movement, it all runs fairly smoothly, and not at all laggy as you have described. And for comparisons sake, my stats are in my sig. I have one of these "lesser computers" you speak of ^^. Dammit, I hate my PC, lol. I can't wait until I can get a newer one.

While off topic, you are more than welcome to my present new system. I hate the thing. As soon as a few things I am downloading are done I am moving back to my Athlon 3200 XP+ system. This Athlon 64 I have I just plain hate it. It could just be my install of XP but I really don't thnk so.

Don. Edwards

While on the subject of mouse behaviour, for 1.4.1 I inverted the scroll wheel direction (down now takes you farther away instead of nearer) under the pressure of, mainly, Fridger to get the KDE interface compatible with the others.

Now Google releases Google Earth for Linux, and I realise that they have made the same choice I made initialy (and which IMO is more logical) down takes you, guess what... down!

I think I'm going to add an option to revert to this same behaviour, it's just too confusing to go from one to the other when going from Celestia to Google Earth.

Christophe wrote:While on the subject of mouse behaviour, for 1.4.1 I inverted the scroll wheel direction (down now takes you farther away instead of nearer) under the pressure of, mainly, Fridger to get the KDE interface compatible with the others.

Now Google releases Google Earth for Linux, and I realise that they have made the same choice I made initialy (and which IMO is more logical) down takes you, guess what... down!

I think I'm going to add an option to revert to this same behaviour, it's just too confusing to go from one to the other when going from Celestia to Google Earth.

Christophe,

I agree with you. The better solution seems that the various devs just agree on ONE effectively superior cursor assigment. Can't be too hard.

Cheers,
Fridger

Jeffe wrote:Is it possible through some option to change the cursor/crosshair behavior to not stay where it was upon dragging and releasing? I can barely use Celestia because of this because it's too much of a muscle memory change and becomes distracting/annoying very quickly. It's a terrific program, but this really ruins the experience.

(Come to think of it, this is XP I'm using - I think the Linux version at some point didn't do this, but I don't remember how long ago I tried that)

I deliberately made Celestia behave this way . . . I like being able to rotate the view freely without having to reset the mouse pointer when it reaches the edge of the screen. I didn't realize that this feature bothered some people.

--Chris

Personally I've never noticed this problem. Instead that "panning" with left mouse drag I usually rotate the observer dragging the mouse with the right button. I find it more "realistic".

The Google Earth HUD interface is very intuitive indeed. It would be great to have something like that in Celestia when the observer goes below a certain altitude from the surface.

Kind regards