When your mouse pointer flickers or doesn’t run smoothly, maybe the refresh rate of your mouse it set too low…

What’s the mouserate?

To be able to move your mouse cursor on screen of course your operating system has got to know the mouse has been moved by you on the mouse-pad. This is done by polling the mouse for any input at the device it is plugged in. Basically you can use the standard PS/2- or an USB-port to plug in your mouse. PS/2 comes with a standard polling rate of 80hz (adjustable from 20 hz to 200 hz). USB comes up with a standard polling rate of 125hz (overclockable to 250hz, 500hz and 1000hz). Depending on your setup, you force your mouse to send data via PS/2 or USB to your operating system every 8 ms (= 125hz), 4 ms (= 250hz), 2 ms (= 500hz) and so on…

What’s the positive effect of a higher mouserate?

Your cross-hair may move more smoothly the higher the polling rate is set up. You will feel the difference from 125hz to 500hz. But you probably won’t feel any more difference between 500hz and 1000hz. A smooth mousemovement is essential in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, as you need to be able to aim precisely, you need to be able to target fast and you got to avoid any erratic movements. Sometimes it is just the little 1 ms of reaction time that is missing due to imperfect hardware setup and that thus makes you lose a duel. So you should set it up to 200 hz (PS/2) or 500hz (USB) if you don’t witness any of the possible disadvantages (USB) – like I do …

Any risks of a tweaking the USB-polling-rate?

Yes – there may be some! First: the higher the USB-polling rate, the higher your cpu-usage will be. Depending on your hardware this increase can be massive for each usb-device that is excessively refreshing data at high frequency. Further more common risks in combination with overclocking your USB-polling rate are damages to your hardware (e. g. your mainboard or your usb-peripherals such as your mouse if it can’t handle the higher polling rate) or stability issues with your pc. Tweak on your own risk!

How do I raise the polling rates?

PS/2 settings from RaZiel

To tweak your USB-ports use UsbRate v0.5 from RaZiel (download). Make sure you disable the realtime feature as it may crash your pc.

To tweak your PS/2-port go into your mouse-properties menu or use the PS2Rate-Tool (download) and adjust it like the thumbnail shows.

Reboot to let the changes take effect.

How do I test the changes?

Use mouserate.exe from Oliver Tscherwitschke (download) to measure your actual polling rate. To do this, move your mouse around in circles and watch the output. Ideally the measures are constant or at least not changing massively each poll. This would eventually damage your mouse and besides it would not support a smooth aiming.

So… in the end?

Don’t expect to be able to boost your aiming skills by adjusting the polling rate. But this is just one of many stones in the mosaic you can use for little improvement. I personally use a Logitech MX 518 mouse via the PS/2 port. The samplingrate is set up to 200hz with input buffer length 100. RaZiel suggested an input buffer length of 300 (see thumbnail from Aiming By RaZiel-Tutorial). I tried out USB at 500hz once but it ate just too many of my cpu-resources plus it seemed I did not to get a stable polling rate, so I got back to PS/2 again with which I played for many years… and it still works fine for me.

Poll:

In Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory you do not necessarily shoot at where your cross-hair points: like in real life bullets do spread. There are three dimensions where you should know the details to master spread and improve your accuracy and aiming: (A) the game engine, (B) your setup/configuration and (C) your way of playing.

But now to the insights…

(A) The game-engine and weapon-spread

In ET the spread of your standard weapons (mp40, Thomson, Luger, colt, Sten, …) is affected by 5 factors:

1. View: moving your cross-hair / looking around increases spread
   The more you move your cross-hair around, the more weapon spread you will get. In times you move your mouse, spread increases while in times you don’t move your mouse, it will decrease steadily. Player velocity does not have any impact on spread of unscoped weapons. You can see the size of your weapon spread by activating cross hair-pulsing for example:

   set cg_crosshairPulse 1 // activate cross-hair pulsating
   set cg_drawcrosshair 4 // cross-hair: little spot in center plus pulsating circle around it

   

   big hitboxes (jaymod): hitable behind a corner

   So be aware of the ET’s hitbox model (hitboxes are much bigger than the models which makes some cross-hair-movement unnecessary) and reduce cross-hair-movement to a minimum. Especially avoid erratic mouse-movements and trace as smooth as possible. RaZiel mastered the idea of aiming like this – have a look at his tutorial.

2. Shooting: continuous shooting increases spread
   Short range fights usually don’t last long and every hit is crucial, so in most cases you are forced to shoot continuesly and shooting bursts is no option. Long range combats often last longer. Shooting small bursts of 3 to 5 bullets each should be considered if you can’t start of the fight with doing massive damage to your opponent. Concentrate on short range duels to get the maximum out of you rounds.
3. Receiving Damage: getting hit by bullets increases spread
   When you get hit by your opponent, your screen shakes. This will hurt your aim. Further more the knock back will raise weapon spread (analysis/implications from overdrive). Both make it inevitable for you to do your best not to get hit – strafe with and without stamina, use obsticles as cover, crouch, prone, …
4. 

   spread

   Movement: crouching and proning decrease spread while beeing in the air dramatically increases spread
   [GORE]Hallelujah did an analysis on how movement affects weapon-spread back in 2003. He found out that spread in standing/crouching/proning-position is nearly equal, when you fire small bursts of 2-3 bullets. If you fire continuously, the spread of crouching and proning is still the same but in standing position it is much higher (see screenshot). Further more Madscientist found out in his analysis 2006 that crouching will reduce spread to 50% from standing position. Being in the air (jumping, free fall, strafing on rough terrain, …) will result in twice the maximum spread you get when shooting in standing position. And proning will give you maximum spread for the first second and then decays to half the spread as crouching does.

5. Experience-Points: light weapons level 4 and covert ops level 3 decrease spread
   When you receive light weapons level 4, your weapon spread will reduce by 35%. (Note that it is level 4 and not level 3 like the manual says as [GORE]Hallelujah points out). Further more covert ops level 3 reduces spread by 35% for the Sten and the FG42. Interestingly this spread reduction seems to be transportable on the standard-weapons and also combineable with light weapons level 4 for maximum spread reduction (see analysis again from [GORE]Hallelujah). You should be aware of that to be able to evaluate your own aim and that of others on the server (e. g. if you join a server with players who have many XP).
6. Your weapon choice: the MP40 (Axis) seems to have slightly less spread than the Thomson (Allies)
   

   Spread: MP40 vs. Thomson

   Ifurita from planetwolfenstein did an analysis some years ago in RTCW on how many rounds a weapon is able to fire per second. He found out that the MP40 has a slightly higher firering rate than the Thomson (~ 6 vs. 5 rounds per second). You should now probably expect compensating the Axis advantage by having more spread. On the contrary: from the screenshots he made you can conclude that the MP 40 also has slightly less spread when fired in small bursts from 3 to 5 rounds. Of course all on the condition that the analysis is a.) correct and b.) also applies on Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.

(B) Your Config

1. Mousepad/-underground: Make sure your mousepad is clean and you just a minimum friction between pad and your mouse. The more friction, the less smooth will be your mousemovement.
2. Sensitivity: a sensitivity of zero would reduce weapon spread due to crosshairmovement to zero of course. But that wouldn’t be practical. Low sensers have got some advantages considering weapon spread. So they usually also do more headshots than high sensitivity users. I use a sensitivity of 5 in connection with pointerspeed 6 of 11 in windows xp which is very high, but manageable. See the Aiming by RaZiel-Tutorial for finding your sensitivity.
3. FPS / Frames per second: As overdrive states in his article, FPS increases recoil and your mouse will react a lot faster the higher the frames per second. Keep your FPS high, but as stable as possible at the same time. I have a quite old computer and thus I use com_maxfps 76. In most maps I can archive a stable FPS like this.
4. Mouserate: the higher, the smoother your aim can be. Basically you can chose between USB and PS/2. RaZiel stated 2003 that for him PS/2 worked better than USB, because with his Logitech Mouse he het a.) a higher mouserate of 200hz and b.) a more stable one that with USB (120hz). Overdrive stated 2006 in his article, that nowadays for most mice USB would be more suitable than PS/2 and that you can archive 450, 500 or even 1000hz. I myself use a Logitech MX518 with 200hz and inputbufferlength 100 on PS/2. With USB I could only get a maximum of 120hz. To check how often your mousedata gets refreshed check mouserate.exe from that RaZiel-Package (Tools-Folder).
5. FPS > mousrate: Madscientist found out about the phenomenon that spread due to cross-hair movement will decrease when you got more frames per second than mouse signals per second. This sounds logical as some for some frames the game engine cannot register any mouse movement which results in decreasing spread. Turn spread can be even reduced to zero (!) when FPS is twice as high as the mouserate. So if you put your mouse on USB with standard polling rate of 125hz and you have constant 250fps – … lucky boy!
6. Mouse-DPI / -Dots Per Inch: the more dpi, the smoother your aiming can be. But be aware of a little bug in the quake-engine that causes negative acceleration with high DPI.

(C) Your way of playing

(soon)

Note: if you want to play the game completely without spread, just check out the server under 85.17.39.194 which Madscientist set up (2006 – still active?).

RaZiel was a famous Return to Castle Wolfenstein-player years ago. Many people today still count him to one of the best RTCW players ever. Luckily he wanted to share his recipes for improving your aiming and tactical finesse with the community, so he wrote a tutorial to the end of 2003: Aiming by RaZiel.

Download Aiming by RaZiel here (97.5mb; contains some docs, videos, tweaks, patches, analysises and configs)

Although the tutorial is quite old and targets RTCW-players, things haven’t changed that much and the lessons are also relevant to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory-Players. This one is a must-have for every ambitious player.

Some excerpts from the content:

Folder Examples:
It contains some videos with scenes of him playing plus an explanation what he did and what you can learn from the specific video. To give you an idea, here we go with the low-quality version from YouTube.com:

Note among other things how his crosshair nearly always sticks to head-level… Thats the aim we need. In the package you will find the videos in high resolution.

Folder Sensitivity:
Beside a registry-fix that will kill your Windows(R) mouse-acceleration if it’s activated, you will find a guide on how to improve your aiming. A low-quality-preview from YouTube.com to get you an idea:

The tutorial centers around eliminating most friction between your mouse and your mousepad/-underground and then adjusting & finding the sensitivity thats works best for you to precisely aim at a small spot while strafing with or without using stamina. Note how smoothly his crosshair wanders with almost no vertical movement. (I will come to the relevance of that point in another article.)

Aim sponsored by Pronto Classic

I myself use a wooden table as mouseunderground from the beginning on. Before I start to play I often use to polish the underground with Pronto Classic furniture spray to minimize friction. As I am a high-sensitivity player, I never will get that ultra-smooth mousemovement and thus that RaZiel-poweraim. But the key to success I believe is to find your personal setup and style, stick to it (and not adjust your configuration every time you loose) and improve it by practicing alot. And: The games hitboxes luckily are big enough, so that it would be overdone to be able to track a small pixel…