having a moment here in gnome
to everyone pointing out that this is for touchpads;
a: it’s awful on that too
b: note the mouse in the example given
There was a point in time where first person video games couldn’t make their minds up and so games came with the option to have the y-axis inverted. Moving the mouse up would make the PC look down and vice versa.
It’s because of joysticks and typical flight controls. Pushing forward goes down and pulling backwards is “pulling up”.
Joysticks rules for a long time before the mouse came out. Home computers came standard with joystick ports.
Keyboard controls followed this convention and when mouse controls came into FPS games this was the first instinct… Moving the mouse “forward” looks down.
I hate when games DON’T have the option. In FPS non-inverted makes more sense, but in 3rd person games if I can’t invert the camera if just feels unplayable.
Still a setting in any game worth caring about. I still prefer inverted in some cases.
Something like a mounted turret makes more sense inverted if you think of the mouse as an analog of your hand. Moving the handles down would move the tip of the barrel up. This analogy could easily extend to a two handed rifle or even a hand gun if your mental reference is the back of the gun, the handle
It’s the same with left versus right, which nobody has yet talked about. It you angled my head right, my vision would be turning towards the left. Both of these need to be inverted.
The way my brain rationalizes it (inverted y, normal x) is that the closest analog to my hand on a mouse is my hand on top of my character’s head.
To make that head look up I pull my hand back, which is the same exact motion as pulling the mouse back. So it feels natural.
To make the head look left, I would rotate my hand counterclockwise. Rotating a mouse doesn’t do anything, so I have to translate that to lateral motion, and left to look left feels more natural.
Of course the real explanation is that the first mouselook games I played defaulted to inverted y and normal x, so that’s what I got used to. And even before mouselook became a thing, I was playing flight sims, which default to inverted y. Still, it’s fun to try to rationalize something that ultimately boils down muscle memory.
If I have a camera on a tripod and I angle down…the view goes up. If I angle up, the view goes down.
I much prefer a simpler analogy: If I look up, I look up. If I look down, I look down.
If you imagine the mouse strapped to the back of your head, then moving it up would tilt your head down, but it would also tilt you head left when you moved it right. So if you want to use realism (in this mouse behind the head scenario) as an argument for inversion then you would need left and right inverted too.
However, if you strap the mouse to your face, now if you move the mouse up, your head tilts up aswell. If you move it right, you look right. And given in 1st person games the camera is at the front of the head, this is why non-inverted is preferred.
The only argument for either is personal preference and more people prefer the latter, non-inverted, which is why it is not the default.
I personally invert the axes in third person scenarios because the camera moves around the character and i want to move the camera.
Within first person shooters i don’t because i move the camera/head to where i want to look.
I did this with a controller for the longest time. Specifically, the thing was not first/third person byt “do I have a visible crosshair or not”, as that defined if I am directly moving the camera/head, or if the crosshair is like a laser pointer I move on the screen and the character looks towards it.
I finally had to decide one way or the other with Monster Hunter: World as the sling requires switching between the two rapidly and while you actually can set separate inverts for first and third person, it means you can’t “follow” a monster smoothly while switching to the sling, you need to also quickly flick the stick to the other direction. Took me roughly 20 hours of rather chaotic gameplay for it to finally “click” in an instant.
I chose non-inverted as it was easier to imagine a crosshair than it was to ignore one that existed.
If they grab the back of your head, sure, but if they grabbed your nose and angled it up your vision would go up. The question, then, is where is your perception of the mouse
Spoken like a gentleman who drinks his orange juice warm while eating his daily tune of toothpaste.
