Meditation
If you like Beyond Good & Evil, you might also like my writeup and the soundtrack.
Problem
I recently played the game Beyond Good & Evil, and I loved every minute of it. However, it has a bug that prevents inverting the mouse input, in both “look” and “camera” modes.
I’m very used to inverting the mouse in games, so I looked for a fix. Anything that can invert mouse input on the y axis, and works with DirectInput would work. After a lot of work, including posts to many forums, and even a Google Answers question, I found a few solutions.
Solutions
Moritz Franckenstein has written a shareware mouse driver that inverts the y axis. Thanks, Moritz!
Otherwise, if you have Logitech MouseWare, and you’re comfortable editing the registry, try Ashley Ings’ instructions, originally posted on the Logitech forums. It works with both Logitech and non-Logitech mice.
Background
Before Moritz contacted me, I’d done a fair amount of research on this. When I got to the point where I needed to write a Windows device driver, I called it quits. That was a too much of a time investment, even for me. :P
I knew I needed either a setting or registry entry in Windows XP (or DirectX) that controls mouse orientation per-axis, or a program that runs in the background and inverts the mouse input (per-axis).
I first looked through the windows mouse control panel, the registry, etc., and didn’t found anything.
I tried installing Logitech’s MouseWare and Advanced Settings Utility, which lets you change the mouse’s orientation, and has effect in DirectInput-based apps (close!), but doesn’t let you change it per-axis. I also tried Kensington MouseWorks, but I don’t have a Kensington mouse, so I couldn’t use it.
I tried a number of utilities that let you drive the mouse pointer with a joystick, and can control the orientation of each axis independently…but the ones I tried don’t have any effect when you use the mouse itself.
Finally, I wrote a script for AutoHotKey, a pretty sophisticated program that lets you script and remap mouse, keyboard, and joystick input. It inverts the mouse per-axis successfully, but doesn’t affect DirectInput apps.
15 Comments
Well, I finally got Beyond Good and Evil and just installed it this morning to find I hate the uninverted Y-axis. Then when I inverted it in-game, as you know, the X-axis also becomes inverted…
In other words, it’s what… almost 2 years later and, through the magic of the web, I see that you and others have had the same problem when the game first came out. I sent an email to Moritz and hopefully he still has that little mouse driver lying around somewhere. The logitech forum thing by Ashley Ing no longer exists, afaict. And, of course, logitech and autohotkey and other sorts of drivers and utilities have been updated since you wrote this… So I guess I will spend my morning downloading it all and seeing if the newer versions can invert the Y-axis… bleh. :)
- Mark
Oh! oh!
I just found the google cache of the Ashley Ings post on the Logitech forums.
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:lmAn3VASV3wJ:forums.logitech.com/pe/forums/displaypost.jsp%3FpostID%3D10125316+%22Ashley+Ings%22&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=6
- Mark
thanks! i’ll mirror it here in case google ever forgets it.
You can find my axis inverting and rotating mouse filter driver now here: http://www.maf-soft.de/mafmouse/
(Maybe you can add the link to your text…)
You say that the driver from Maf-soft is freeware – it isn’t.
According to the readme it’s a trial version which “automatically deactivates after a random amount of time after each machine restart”.
What is the point of installing that if it’s going to just stop working without warning?
I’d say that this is an unsolved problem…
thanks for the clarification. you’re right, it is shareware, not freeware. it still seems like a perfectly good solution to the problem, though, even if it’s not free.
…Waow, very nice Work!
@maffu: Of course not your mouse will stop working, but the driver will stop inverting the y-axis. This way you can test the driver under real conditions before you buy. The registration fee is as low as US$10, currently.
I have a MX310 optical mouse.
In the registry under the HKEY_Local_Machine folder and the CurrentControlSet-Services- L8042PR2 folder, you said above you can change the “DeviceModel” to “trackman4.” in order to enable the oriention tabl. I looked and found no keys for “DeviceModel” in that folders.
I did find OpticalMouse14 (MX310) entries under HKEY_Local_Machine folder and the CurrentControlSet-Services-LMouFlt2 folder.. also under the system and users folders with keys for “orientation” in order to enter the degrees of rotation, but again, no entry that I can see to turn the orientraion tab on in the software.. I know there’s got to be some way to do this.. how do I get the orientation tab to show up for the MX310 mouse?
Any help would be appreciated,
Doane
OK, I got this to work by attaching the mouse with a USB to PS2 adapter and then had the registry entries available to change.
When configured as a “trackman4″ it does an install at boot up and thinks it’s a track ball. You have the orientation tab options, but loose the use of some of the programmable buttons.
Warning!! If you try to change it back to “opticalmouse14″ in the registry it will hose your computer, couldn’t boot, had to safe boot and do a restore, then had no mouse use at all. Had to reinstall the mouseware over the old install to get the mouse to work again. Several hours of work getting things back to normal, so I would say, Do Not Do This Registry Trick!
Use your video card rotate only and or get a track ball or tablet that you can rotate instead.
http://www.download.com/SakasaMouse/3000-2056_4-10553398.html
“SakasaMouse is a freeware to reverse direction of mouse cursor movement in x-axis and/or y-axis.”
easy to use. works perfectly with 3d games. banzai! :)
_zetto23 ,YOU are the man!!!THANK YOU!!!
THANKS _zetto23!!!!!
Sakasa Mouse works only in windows, when you start game mouse is not invertes, as for drivers you can’t install them on windows x64. Anyone have another idea ?
i just tried the HD remake on xbox 360, and nine years later, it still has the exact same problem! what’s worse, it’s on a console, so you can’t use hacks like the ones described above to fix it. argh!
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