Comments on: Annotated 33-10

By: Zak McKracken

Zak McKracken — Sun, 18 Apr 2021 13:00:13 +0000

Which goes to show that touchpads *do* have a disadvantage versus mice, which is of course not saying they had not come a long way.

…me, I use a wireless mouse and keyboard when playing from the couch, but I can see how having something you can just hold in your hands is an advantage.

I’m totally not against touchpads, and do use them myself occasionally.They’re way better than those small rubber knobs some laptops use, or trackballs. I even ind them better for scrolling, pinching and the like instead of the mouse wheel, just as a good analogue joystick can’t be beat for flight simulations, or a 3D trackball (+mouse) for CAD. But for pointing/aiming and clicking … I just think that lots of people don’t really notice how much faster a mouse can be when you do have the space to use it comfortably.

By: Abnaxis

Abnaxis — Thu, 15 Apr 2021 14:08:34 +0000

I actually love my Steam controller. The touchpad isn’t as good as a mouse for FPS, but it is better than a joystick and a godsend if you want to hook a PC up to a TV and play it from the couch

Also, I totally set it up to play GW2.

By: Zak McKracken

Zak McKracken — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 19:58:48 +0000

oh wow!
I did play GW2 for a while, and I can’t imagine how that would work. Like, with a mouse I have at least three buttons and a wheel, and I can press them simultaneously, while moving the mouse. With a trackpad you need to move the pointer to where it needs to go, stop, tap … I guess it would be kind of alright when playing casually, and there are certainly people who’re faster than me with trackpads. I’m pretty slow with a mouse, too (as everyone I ever played Counterstrike or Stracraft with will confirm), but just the inability to do more than one thing at a time must be weird. Does GW2 have an option to use the keyboard to trigger things otherwise controlled by mouse keys? On the other hand, many abilities in GW2 are triggered by function keys anyway, so I suppose that’s not really affecting things. And you never have to properly aim at anything.

All that said: If I had two PCs and wanted to play some reasonably recent video game, I see very little reason to use a laptop instead. Bigger screen, better graphics, better inputs.

By: Zak McKracken

Zak McKracken — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 19:48:12 +0000

Fair point to some degree, and I’ll frankly admit that I *am* at times irritated by them …

I used my first trackpad in 1996. I thought it was brilliant. That is: To use when all you have is a laptop and no clean, even surface on which a mouse ball wouldn’t slip on, where the alternatives are using nothing but the keyboard, or bringing along some kind of board plus mouse pad. These days, with wireless optical laser mice, the only advantage of trackpads is that they’re attacked to the laptop.

However, I can’t tell you how often I’ve stood next to people using a trackpad, ignoring their mouse, taking endless time and multiple swipes to get the mouse pointer to move across the screen to where it needs to go. I’ve yet to see anyone who is faster with a trackpad than a mouse user with a very moderate amount of training.

Case in point: Remember when Valve was advertising their new controller with touchpads instead of joysticks, claiming that you could play an FPS with them and be just as fast and accurate as with a mouse? That did not actually work, it just kind of almost got close, and that was with their fancy vibration feedback thing that was supposed to help you “feel” how far you’re going. That was a big improvement but didn’t actually work as well as a regular old mouse.

By: Weatherbeard

Weatherbeard — Sun, 11 Apr 2021 22:38:11 +0000

I play Guild Wars 2 more than I might like (mostly because I don’t want it to be my exclusive form of entertainment) and I also play on a laptop sans mouse. It’s… not bad. A mouse is more responsive, especially on quick camera movements, but hardly necessary for an MMO. FPS, on the other hand, would be a nightmare.