Of Mice and Men
A pet peeve of mine is controls that aren’t rebind-able. But more specifically, controlling something with the scroll-wheel. Very often these controls can’t be undone in any way, resulting in game half-measure to avoid it, or ridiculous mechanic issues. Or at least, if your scroll wheel is broken. In Reflex, this results in my weapon switching mid-fight, usually resulting in a death. In Intruder, this results in a complete inability to open/use doors, or zoom with the sniper rifle. It’s also very common to use the scroll wheel as a “zoom” function, which results in the player only being able to see like, 2 meters in front of them in some games. In short:
Stop hard-coding scroll wheel controls!
But there’s sort of a fix for this. (That has a slight probability of getting you banned). Using a program called AutoHotkey. It’s a program that lets you script keypresses, allowing you to automate certain functions, or trigger a series of keypresses with one button (often called a macro). Here’s a script taken straight from the Intruder forums:
#SingleInstance force #NoEnv SetBatchLines 1 SendMode Input scrollnum = 2 #IfWinActive Intruder ~h & ~j::Scroll("down", scrollnum) ~j & ~h::Scroll("down", scrollnum) ~[::Scroll("down", scrollnum) ~y & ~u::Scroll("up", scrollnum) ~u & ~y::Scroll("up", scrollnum) ~]::Scroll("up", scrollnum) Scroll(dir, cnt=1) { Loop, %cnt% { Click, Wheel%dir% if (A_Index != cnt) { Sleep, 1 } } }
Which basically just scrolls if you press y+u, h+j, [, and ]. It’s a dumb fix for a dumb problem, and demonstrates a major usability in modern games.
I always break the scroll wheels on my mice obscenely fast. So I always end up setting this stuff up on my computers. But it’s a problem that just, y’know, shouldn’t happen? Anyway, don’t expect to see this crap in my games.
