What does mouse acceleration do

A pointer lock is the canonical term for when a desktop application hides the pointer icon and interprets mouse motion for something else, e. The movementX and movementY attributes from the mousemove document events tell you how much the mouse pointer moved since the last move event. However, those are not updated when the pointer moves outside of the web page. Capturing the mouse pointer or requesting a pointer lock allows you to not worry about the pointer moving outside anymore.

This is especially useful for immersive web games. When the pointer is locked, all mouse events go to the target element of the pointer lock. Call requestPointerLock on the target element to request a pointer lock, and listen to pointerlockchange and pointerlockerror events to monitor pointer lock changes.

This way, mouse movement data from mousemove events won't include mouse acceleration when the pointer is locked. Use the new returned promise from requestPointerLock to know if the request was successful. It is possible to toggle between accelerated and non-accelerated mouse movement data without releasing the pointer lock. Simply request the pointer lock again with the desired option.

The distance your mouse pointer moves increases proportionally to how fast you move the mouse. This is useful for high-resolution displays , as it gives you a way to intuitively control the sensitivity of the mouse with speed. There are two ways in which mouse acceleration can manifest. The other type is negative acceleration, where the pointer moves shorter distances the faster the mouse goes. Mouse smoothing is a method to prevent jerky mouse pointers or control motion.

This is only useful for mice with low-resolution sensors, where sensors adjust to cover the gaps in the data. However, even the cheapest modern mice have relatively high-resolution sensors. Mouse sensitivity is the fixed ratio between physical movement increments and how much the pointer moves on screen.

This is a software-based form of mouse sensitivity and should not be confused with mice that can vary their DPI Dots Per Inch at the hardware level for the same effect. In games where you use the mouse to aim, mouse acceleration can throw off your accuracy. Turning off mouse acceleration will require a period of adjustment. Not only does the software multiply mouse movements, it increases the speed on a curve.

That means that the number the mouse movement is multiplied by gets bigger the faster the mouse moves. This handy chart from StackOverflow shows the idea pretty well. In shooters, consistancy is key. That means that no matter what, if a player moves their mouse a certain distance at a certain speed, they need to know what that translates to in a game. It seems like mouse acceleration makes knowing where a cursor will end up almost impossible, but in reality it can be just another layer of memorization.

Guides usually tell new players to turn it off for one simple reason. Training muscle memory is tough enough already. No mouse accel means that players have more direct control over their in-game angle than players who use the setting.