No blinking cursor effect - is my mouse sensitivity too high or too low?

[Nowhere Girl]

I know the blinking cursor trick - the one that when you place your cursor at the very edge of a tight group of Lemmings, far enough that the cursor is blinking, clicking it will always select a lemming which has just turned in the opposite directions. Often used for making sure that you build out of a small pit in the right direction... but oh well, you probably know and recognise it.
It used to work, but now it doesn't. I pretty much can't put my cursor exactly in the right place to have it blink. I don't remember when this problem started, but it certainly makes completing some levels very hard.
I also often have problems with cutting screenshots and other images - it is very hard to put the mouse in the right place (for just the edge of the picture) without zooming in. I assume that both the Lemmings problem and the picture problem might be related to mouse settings. However, I have no idea whether the problems mean that my mouse sensitivity is too high or too low. If anyone recognises this kind of problems, please help.

[WillLem]

Welcome to the Forums!

I know the blinking cursor trick - the one that when you place your cursor at the very edge of a tight group of Lemmings, far enough that the cursor is blinking, clicking it will always select a lemming which has just turned in the opposite directions.

I know it well! It's one of the revived-from-classic-lemmings features in SuperLemmix to help players when Classic Mode is engaged.

Most other engines post-WinLemm have smoothed out the flickering cursor behaviour because it's no longer necessary with direction select (using the arrow keys to select a lemming fcaing a particular way) being a thing.

Which engine/platform/emulator are you using to play Lemmings?

[Simon]

Indeed, it's plausible that the image-editing problem and the lemming-controlling problem come from the same underlying problem. It sounds as if the cursor moves more than one pixel per minimum physical mouse movement, and you want to move one pixel at a time.

Try to lower the mouse speed of the operating system. (E.g., in Windows 10: Settings -> Mouse -> Cursor Speed, drag the slider leftward.) Does that help?

Does your mouse have physical buttons that control its sensitivity? Lower the sensitivity on the mouse then, too.

-- Simon

[Nowhere Girl]

Which engine/platform/emulator are you using to play Lemmings?

I'm playing the original Lemmings games in D-Fend Reloaded. I have used DOSBox with D-Fend frontend since my computer was no longer able to run many DOS games (so since Windows XP), though, and D-Fend Reloaded with in-built DOSBox for over ten years now, and the problem only appeared in the last two years or so.

Does your mouse have physical buttons that control its sensitivity? Lower the sensitivity on the mouse then, too.

Nope. I don't like mice with a hundred buttons (I'm picky anyway... I have relatively big hands and find small mice uncomfortable, and I love blue so much that I only want mice with some deep blue...), so I use a mouse with just two buttons and a wheel.

[namida]

Most other engines post-WinLemm have smoothed out the flickering cursor behaviour because it's no longer necessary with direction select (using the arrow keys to select a lemming fcaing a particular way) being a thing.

The reason this doesn't happen in NeoLemmix is not because it directly was fixed, but rather due to the underlying physics bug/detail that caused it being fixed. This happens because in DOS physics, a walker always moves one pixel ahead, and if he's inside a wall at this point, he then turns around but remains inside the wall. Thus - the behavior is simply a result of the lemming being inside the cursor region for exactly one frame. Likewise, he's only there for one frame because the pixel right inside the wall is under the cursor, but the pixel outside the wall is not - and because he turns around on this frame, he'll always be facing the desired direction. You just extend this to multiple lemmings coming into the cursor, each for one frame at a time, and there - the cursor itself is actually behaving 100% bug-free, but a physics bug (or at least a weird detail of physics) results in behavior that looks like a cursor bug.

I would be willing to bet that Lix is the same - it would happen there too if Lix replicated DOS's turn-around-at-wall physics, but it doesn't.

[Nowhere Girl]

Try to lower the mouse speed of the operating system. (E.g., in Windows 10: Settings -> Mouse -> Cursor Speed, drag the slider leftward.) Does that help?

It seems to have helped... not 100% reliable, but if I lower the cursor speed even more, it becomes uncomfortably slow for other uses... I hope that this will be enough. I just did a very preliminary test. In order to truly try it, I'll have to actually play "Holiday Lemmings 1993" again and get to the level which I couldn't complete because of this problem.

[Mindless]

I had a Logitech wireless mouse that had a similar problem – it was very difficult to move the pointer by 1 pixel.  I assume it's a power-saving feature where the mouse doesn't transmit its movement to the computer if the movement is very small.  I ended up just getting a different brand of mouse because I find it uncomfortable to lower the pointer velocity.

[WillLem]

The reason this doesn't happen in NeoLemmix is not because it directly was fixed, but rather due to the underlying physics bug/detail that caused it being fixed ... the behavior is simply a result of the lemming being inside the cursor region for exactly one frame ... the cursor itself is actually behaving 100% bug-free

I see.

The way it's re-implemented in SLX is to allow the cursor an extra pixel's grace on each side depending on which direction the Lemming is facing. So, the extra pixel of physics movement from the lemming remains fixed, and it's instead a deliberate choice to let the cursor find the lemming within (pixel X) as long as it's facing a certain direction.