Official forums for BZFlag.org

Well, here's the deal. Whenever I start BZFlag it tries to hide my mousepointer (which I guess it should), however on my system it doesn't hide all of it. When playing the game I'm stuck with a really irritating "half-pointer". Anyone with the same problem, or even better, some way of resolving it?

Some specs:
BZFlag: 1.10.0
OS: Gentoo Linux 1.4rc1
X11: 4.3.99
GFX Card: Aopen GeForce4 440MX
nVIDIA drivers: 1.0.4496
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TIA // n0id

hide the mouse pointer? Bz has never done that on my system...even with version 1.10.2

running Mandrake 9.2

is there something we are missing? I wouldn't mind being able to hide my mouse cursor while playing bz...just have gotten used to it

Me too.......
Mac os X, Irix, w2k and XP

n0id,

In Linux I always have a full pointer. As for the half-pointer, I have a suggestion here. I have a very similar setup:

BZflag 1.10.2
Gentoo Linux (version not applicable, it's well synced )
XFree 4.3.0
Gainward GeForce 4 MX440
nVIDIA drivers 1.0.5328 (however I very recently used 1.0.4496 with no other mentioned system specs changed)

Try upgrading nVIDIA drivers to 1.0.5328. This driver works very well for me in Gentoo and solved a glitch I had in another FPS. Also try an upgrade of BZflag to 1.10.2.

If all that fails, I think your problem could be XFree related. I haven't tried 4.3.99 myself yet as I don't have any specific reason to install that masked version. I would rather wait for 4.4.

Hope that helps.

Edit: I wouldn't want to play with a hidden mouse pointer anyhow, I would have less information about what the tank is currently doing (less precision etc.). It's hard to explain precisely what I mean with words, but I hope you understand. On the other hand it wouldn't hurt if the mouse cursor was shaped as a crosshair or something.

Dave

Well, looks like upgrading either bzflag or my nvidia driver solved the prob (updated them both so I dunno which did what). Now I have a full pointer which at least looks more "sane" than the molested one I used to have.

As for what's better, no pointer or full pointer, I'd guess it's just a matter of taste. Personally I wouldn't mind some way to hide it but it's no biggie.

Anyway, thanks for the help guys!

bzflag does not hide the mouse and IMHO it is usefulto see the mouse pointer, at least this holds true for mouse steering, mayeb it should hide the mosue when using keyboard steering?

There is one other thing: bzflag has a option called 'fakecursor' to draw its own software mouse cursor. In that caseit hides the system cursor. You'd have to enable this by editing the config file, I never tried it, so it might not even work.

Yeah, seems like you're right about bz not hiding the pointer. Guess it was just me getting used to not seeing 90% of it most of the time.

The "fakecursor" option was pretty nice though. I can prolly get used to that one in the future.

Since everyone is discussing the mouse pointer. Does anyone think control would be better if you just mapped keys to forward, backward, spin left, spin right ? Maybe use the mouse/trackball for weapon azimuth.

CM (BAWK!)

It's a nice idea in a way, but unfortunately I think the game would never be the same if we added something such as weapon aim at this point. Nothing stops people from doing a fork (i.e. a new project based on this one) of BZflag, though.

However, you can play BZflag just fine with the keyboard using the arrow keys. Check the options in the game and you'll find a full list of keys that you can use instead of the mouse.

Dave

Man I looked and I don't see any options to map the mouse movement control to keys on the keyboard. Most everyting else is there.

And after some thought I think you are right about putting weapon azimuth control in the game.

L8rs

CM