Camera jumping around when mouse-turning

Vulpinenin

Hello.
This is not a new issue, and is not unique to Ascension, in fact it has happened on a couple of other private servers running vanilla TBC and WotLK, and there are threads on official blizzard forums, detailing that the bug happened on retail too. When I asked in world chat, there was at least one more person beside myself that experienced the issue too.

I have opened a thread here about a year ago for this exact issue, where I had compiled a list of these threads and the possible solutions they offered. However, for some reason this thread has been deleted. I even have the old link that's now broken: https://forum.ascension.gg/topic/2139/help-with-mouse-jumping-centering-when-turning-with-right-click-bug/8

I just wanted to retrace my steps and try to tackle the problem again, is there any chance this thread is cached somewhere on your servers so I can read through it again?

About the issue itself, most of the results on this search ( https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wow+mouse+turning+camera+jumping+issue&t=fpas&ia=web ) are the sources detailing the problem and possible solutions that have not worked for me. I'll still try them out again and report back with the results, but here is the gist of the problem:

Sometimes when I right-click, my mouse cursor resets to the middle of the screen. If I happen to be using that right-click to turn my character (as I most often am, and even if I'm not), that results in a sharp turn of the camera that's incredibly disorienting and annoying, and jumps more the further the mouse is from the center of the screen.

Things that were suggested to fix the problem:
-Enable hardware cursor
-Try windowed/fullscreen
-Sync game framerate with monitor
-Don't use dual monitor setups
-Limit mouse polling rate
-Use another mouse
-Disable all addons

None of which have helped with the problem.
I'm using Windows 10 Pro x64 (I'll add more software and hardware info once I get home), any further suggestions and help would be greatly appreciated. I am determined to get rid of this annoying bug that's been ruining my WoW experience for so long once and for all.

Chielus

@Vulpinenin Top of my head without the further hardware info:

Maybe a long shot, but have you looked at the actual mouse driver? Typically from Windows XP and onward it has been provided by Microsoft and not the manufacturer of the mouse. It can bork in weird ways, although not very common.

Can you check if your manufacturer of the mouse has a actual driver package up on their website?

Vulpinenin

@Chielus thanks for the tip. I have a logitech mouse, but don't use its drivers exactly for the purpose of avoiding problems like this, but I might give it a try.
I have compiled a kilometer-long list of possible solutions from reddit and blizzard forums, and will try them all out and post back here with results.

Chielus

@Vulpinenin Be sure to apply Occam's Razor to this. Meaning that it's typically the obvious thing rather then the obscure one.

In this case, my gut-feeling really is a mouse driver (in combination with hardware cursor) For one simple fact:

@Vulpinenin said in Camera jumping around when mouse-turning:

Things that were suggested to fix the problem:
-Use another mouse

This alone eliminates so many possible problems with both hardware and software as single issues, that the only logical problem should be the translation between hardware and software, hence the driver which Windows shall use on every mouse as long as it's the generic one.

Maybe a bit overkill to do just for this problem, but do you experience the same problem after a fresh install of Windows or using a older/newer version of Windows?

Not a Windows expert by any means as a disclaimer, haven't used the OS in over 10 years.

Vulpinenin

Okay, here are the things I've tried (again):
-Toggling Hardware Cursor, ingame, from the launcher, and from Config.wtf both on and off
-Toggling Vsync / Triple Buffering / Reduce Input Lag
-Toggling Fullscreen/Windowed / Borderless Windowed / Maximized / Disable Resize
-Limiting Foreground / Background FPS and unlimiting them (setting them both to 300)
-Turning my second screen on/off, even unplugging it
-Changing my mouse polling rate to 125, 250, 500 and back to 1000 via Logitech's Onboard Memory Manager tool (I have a Logitech G102 Lightsync mouse)
-Swapping my logitech mouse for an older generic one
-Disabling all addons (all that Ascension would let me anyway)
-Disabling all programs that could have overlays (discord etc)
-Running the game in windows 10's "Safe mode with networking" (with an astounding 5 FPS)
-Disable all mouse utilities/drivers/software etc - I didn't have any to begin with, besides Logitech's Onboard Memory Manager tool that doesn't even run in the background.
-Cleared cache (both manually and from the launcher)
-Disabling my color profile loader (DisplayCAL)
-Disabling everything related to Wacom and graphic tablets - drivers, services etc.
-Set Ascension.exe to only run on a single core (from Task Manager > Set Affinity)
-Set Ascension.exe and WoW.exe to run in various compatibility modes: "Run as Administrator", "Windows XP (service pack 2 and 3)", "Windows 7", "Disable Fullscreen Optimiaztions", "Override High DPI scaling behavior - System (Enhanced) and Application"
-Set my windows scaling to 100% (it was already at 100%)
-Disabled "Enhance Pointer Precision" in Windows' mouse settings
-Installed MarkC's Windows Mouse Acceleration Fix (to keep it disabled at all times)

Things that I tried, but didn't seem to be applicable to Ascension:
-Tried writing ingame console commands, as well as in Config.wtf: "rawMouseEnable" "rawMouseAccelerationEnable" "rawMouseRate" "rawMouseResolution", neither of which seemed to do anything (they must apply to a newer expansion), since "/dump GetCVar("rawMouseEnable"), and the other commands, returns "nil".
-Uncheck "Limit foreground/background FPS" - there is no tickbox on Ascension, only the sliders, and I did try to set them to 300 to "disable" the limit.
-Uncheck "Enable Mouse Sensitivity" - again, no checkbox, only a slider, I left it at 1 (also from config.wtf, again changed to 1)

Things I haven't tried (but might):
-Completely reinstalling the game
-Reformatting the hard drive
-Resetting windows (not likely to go through that hell)
-Installing the game under Linux
-Using other mouse drivers (other than Microsoft's generic mouse driver) - Logitech doesn't seem to have a driver for my specific mouse (G102 Lightsync), but I asked in their reddit (still waiting for an answer). If you have any custom mouse drivers for me to try, send them my way.
-Emulating WoW through Vulkan (I'll be doing that anyway, hope it helps lol)

After all of this, the issues seem to happen a bit less frequently, but I have no idea which of these steps helped and why it didn't eradicate the problem completely - it still happens.
I'm at my wit's end here, any help would be greatly appreciated.

Chielus

@Vulpinenin said in Camera jumping around when mouse-turning:

-Installing the game under Linux
-Emulating WoW through Vulkan (I'll be doing that anyway, hope it helps lol)

Considering you just about did everything that is possible and me not being a Windows expert I only can really comment on these 2.

Let's tackle Vulkan first. As far as my knowledge goes it can only interact with the IO of PCI devices, not with USB. Most likely the hub of the USB is on a PCI lane somewhere, but as far as I know, Vulkan can only communicate directly to the hub, not the actual device. Don't get me wrong, Vulkan is the better choice for 90% of systems these days, but I don't expect any difference in mouse handling at all.

And well... Linux. I hope my bias is clear enough that you can use it as a filter, but let me restate that I'm totally biased towards this solution in a typical case. However you are not typical. I don't know if you work/study IT related stuff, or are just a hobbyist with expanded knowledge. But when I see that people use console commands in game and using a config.ini type of file to set settings in, I know they have a really good shot on a more heavy OS, like Linux or BSD.

If you have no or little experience with Linux, I suggest giving Manjaro a try. This mostly because in my humble opinion, they are the ones who actually make effort of gaming as a part of the OS. Stuff like easy to use driver tools, opensource or otherwise and having a lot of additional gaming tools in the repository, like 32 bit layers and many wine tools. The "version" doesn't really matter in any meaningful way, you can use a lightweight like LXDE or a heavyweight such as GNOME. On a relatively modern system the differences are in single frames per second.

If you decide to dual-boot to Linux to give it a go, let me know and I make sure to be on standby via forum/discord in case help is needed with the process.

For now, I hope a Windows-guru can help you, but that buy sadly ain't me. Would if I could.

Vulpinenin

@Chielus Your insight is highly appreciated.
I have actually dabbled in a few linux distros - Mint, Ubuntu (and Linux Lite that's based on ubuntu, I ran that from my USB thumb drive for a portable OS, was fun xD) and Manjaro, which was my favorite of all (with the cinnamon DE since I'm so used to windows, but KDE looked really sleek too). I tried switching to it as my main OS a couple of years ago, but my determination wavered after hitting a few brick walls in the form of unsupported games that didn't ran on Wine or Proton, with the nail in the coffin being the damn Adobe suite, and now the Affinity suite too (I'm a graphics designer and need these, GIMP, Krita and Inkscape just doesn't cut it :D)

I might give majaro another try, just gotta find the disk space for it. My ideal setup would include a windows VM with a GPU passthrough for those incompatible thingies, but that is still beyond my skillset.

Chielus

@Vulpinenin Yeah as a graphics designer, it's mental to use pure Linux. I mean, it can be done with setting up a literal truckload of wineprefixes, protonlayers and dxvk tools, that it's not even remotely sane to do. All it takes is a single update and start all over again.

Best thing you can do in my humble opinion is the following:

Use Live USB (I suggest Manjaro, but any will do really) to wipe main boot drive and make 2 partitions on it
Use Windows installer and make it run on 1 of the parts
Use Linux USB again and install Linux (This way it saves manually setting up GRUB)
Partition a separate drive as NTFS drive, your "shared data" disk
Install VMWare, VirtualBox, whatever to run Windows on Linux
Install all apps needed for both Windows installs
Make a 1-1 copy of both installs for future reference

Why a setup like this? Simple, if you have a quick thing to do that takes minutes, you can simply do it virtual. If you have a bigger workload, you can swap to bare metal install to get max performance in rendering and what not. When the data drive is NTFS you won't get rights errors in either of the Windows installs, which can be a problem with EXT4, ZFS, etc.

Just my 2 cents though.

--

Disclaimer: Something like this, including installing 5+ games and 5+ apps from adobe, setting up Manjaro itself and all the works... Well, this would take me a "veteran" half a day. So be sure to do it in the weekend or when you can miss a day of productivity.