The mouse drifting issue potential breakthrough

[Vocaleyes]

Not sure if you've gone down this rabbit hole.

valleyofdoom (vod) - Display Resolutions and Scaling Modes

valleyofdoom (vod) - What is identity scaling and how can you use it?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windo ... ig_scaling
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windo ... ktop-image

Code: Select all

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers\Configuration\<id>]
"Scaling"=dword:00000002

Hey mate, long time hope you're keeping well!

From what I can gather that regedit tweak which controls DPI scaling mode is similar to the effect of bypassing DWM, in regard to DWM is a rendering/composition layer & DPi scaling is rendering/display layer.
Changing DPI scaling can affect visual scaling of cursor appearance, how content renders on screen and DPI awareness for applications but unfortunately it appears the accumulation happens in the input pipeline before reaching either the display or rendering layers, so tweaking those downstream settings can't eliminate what already occurred upstream.

Tweaking that DPI scaling option can however make the cursor appear different visually, as in it could look sharper, larger, or positioned slightly differently on screen. But the actual cursor position and the accumulated directional error from the OS input stack remain unchanged. It's only changing how the cursor is rendered, not where it actually is or how it got there. The underlying accumulation still happens, so circle drift persists even if the visual appearance changes.

[Gurt_Tractor]

Hello. I just wanted to chime in to say that I'm really glad that thanks to this thread I've finally found the source of the issue that was causing tremendous confusion for me.

A while ago I noticed that there was look acceleration in Half Life 1, at least it presented as an acceleration issue to me at the time. I did all the supposed fixes and troubleshooting steps, nothing changed the fact that I couldn't get my view to reliably reset to the same position. Trying to figure it out again today and I realised that the reset position was different depending on if I was moving right then left, or left then right. I did some circles and realised that clockwise/counterclockwise movement was the key, and that enabled me to find this thread in the sea of irrelevant internet info.

For whatever reason it seems like HL1 is more affected by this than in other games, can't work out why. All this time I've been thinking that it was a HL1 specific issue, but I can actually induce the same behaviour in other games if I do circles rather than straight lines. It also probably explains why some people don't notice it, if they move the mouse in symmetric arcs the errors probably balance themselves out and the reset point is as expected.

Is there any hope of a solution or amelioration to this issue in the near future? Do we have to go to the OS devs to request some kind of fix? Seems like the Linux folk at least should know about this?