Play more.

jaaakb wrote:

Play more.

??? I dont understand. How does that have anything to do with what we are talking about?

jaaakb wrote:

Play more.

You should probably try to read OP's post from time to time
Yeah.

TorretDunker wrote:

Indeed it is possible however it is expensive. The app costs $35

Pirate Bay

TorretDunker wrote:

Also you can hover on a trackpad. The ability to hover is present in any capitative touch device because they work off electrical signals rather than pressure. It seems like you need to be quite a bit closer on a trackpad.

Well, really depends on how you use the word hover. Put your hand flat on your desk now, you can feel the desk, you could say you are touching it. Technically, you are also hovering, since there are atom sized spaces in between your hand and the desk, because there are atom sized spaces everywhere. If you have to go close enough so you can feel the thing you are touching and there is friction when you move, then I wouldn't call it hovering at all. With tablet, there is no friction, you are actually hovering high enough to reasonably call it hovering.

TorretDunker wrote:

Thank you so much Full Tablet and Cheezstik. As the only differences you mentioned are things I have already taken care of, I can now confidently not buy a tablet considering the only thing i'm missing out on is the increased resolution you mentioned. Perhaps I will get one when and if I actually become decent at this game.

Yeah, it's not like playing with a touchpad is necessarily bad, we all have different playstyles, some made it very far with touchpad, touchscreen, other rare playstyles etc. Good idea on not shelling out the money to buy a tablet yet, as someone with not too bad of a rank but with terrible aim, I can say that aim is only half if not less than half of the game, tablet will mostly only help aim. You still need to get good accuracy, speed, reading, etc.

TorretDunker wrote:

In that case does the software that changes your trackpad to absolute tracking remove the hardware acceleration?

Yes.

Still, depending on your trackpad, other kinds of inaccuracies might show up or be more apparent in absolute mode.

1. Pixel skipping because of the low resolution of the trackpad.
2. Jitter (random "shaking" movement of the cursor close to the point it should be, even when the stylus is still); this issue also happens in some really cheap tablets

Im not certain but I think that the trackpad i'm using has a relatively high resolution. It's a macbook pro trackpad and when i use the demo of the program that converts to absolute mapping I don't notice any of those problems.

TorretDunker wrote:

Im not certain but I think that the trackpad i'm using has a relatively high resolution. It's a macbook pro trackpad and when i use the demo of the program that converts to absolute mapping I don't notice any of those problems.

Just don't worry about it, if you don't notice the problems, then you should be fine. The MacBook touchpads are the best laptop touchpads I've used, you should be fine. (I haven't used many high-end laptops) You should really try mouse though, it will probably be better in the long run.

cheezstik wrote:

TorretDunker wrote:

Im not certain but I think that the trackpad i'm using has a relatively high resolution. It's a macbook pro trackpad and when i use the demo of the program that converts to absolute mapping I don't notice any of those problems.

Just don't worry about it, if you don't notice the problems, then you should be fine. The MacBook touchpads are the best laptop touchpads I've used, you should be fine. (I haven't used many high-end laptops) You should really try mouse though, it will probably be better in the long run.

I actually played with mouse up until about two weeks ago when I switched to trackpad. Im still experimenting with different playstyles and I still definitely wan't to give tablet a shot (if I can borrow one off a friend or try it for free some other way). I have found so far though that using a trackpad and stylus is absolutely the easiest for me. It might have something to do with the stylus i'm using as well. I built my own out of a dead AA battery and the fact that it sits on my trackpad without support means its more like pushing a joystick around (only a lot smoother).

TorretDunker wrote:

cheezstik wrote:

Just don't worry about it, if you don't notice the problems, then you should be fine. The MacBook touchpads are the best laptop touchpads I've used, you should be fine. (I haven't used many high-end laptops) You should really try mouse though, it will probably be better in the long run.

I actually played with mouse up until about two weeks ago when I switched to trackpad. Im still experimenting with different playstyles and I still definitely wan't to give tablet a shot (if I can borrow one off a friend or try it for free some other way). I have found so far though that using a trackpad and stylus is absolutely the easiest for me. It might have something to do with the stylus i'm using as well. I built my own out of a dead AA battery and the fact that it sits on my trackpad without support means its more like pushing a joystick around (only a lot smoother).

That sounds pretty awkward to me, isn't the battery too light, so when you start doing faster jumps, you risk throwing your stylus off the touchpad? Plus, doesn't that scratch your touchpad? Oh well, if it works for you and it's the easiest then that's good for you.

I grip the battery right near the bottom and the negative end of the battery sits on the trackpad. It is very smooth and there is no scratching. Cant speak for my performance on fast jumps as I can't do them. Moving from mouse to trackpad I am now able to pass maps up to about 4 stars so I can only really do basic stuff.

I really recommend that you don't use trackpad, what might feel comfortable now will really limit you in the future. The macbook trackpads are good, but definitely can't compare to a good mouse or tablet. Especially for a tablet-like device, the fact that it doesn't support hovering is a huge deal, if your pseudopen bounces a bit or isn't touching the pad, you'll get a lot of random misses and stuff.

TorretDunker wrote:

This is my second shot at this thread. The first try had issues with immaturity and lack of knowledge.

1) I know the difference between a tablet and a trackpad. I understand absolute vs relative mapping. This thread is about gameplay choices not technical differences..

Except you clearly don't. A trackpad is just a fancy mouse. A tablet is either a trackpad or a map depending on whether you have it in mouse or pen mode.

A mouse operates as a function on a vector by sending and receiving discreet light waves and using the Doppler effect to determine a velocity vector. It then runs this vector through the function to determine how much it should move your cursor and in which direction. This function integrates the velocity vector with respect to the polling rate and the constant term is exactly the current location of the cursor.

A tablet operates as a bijection from a chosen subspace of your tablet area into a chosen subspace of your monitor area. When your tablet receives a signal from your pen it immediately draws the cursor at the corresponding location on your screen in the next frame. Hovering or dragging does not change how this works.

The key difference between hovering/dragging with a pen and using a trackpad (which functions the same way a mouse does) is in the math behind the cursor calculation. To say they are the same would be the same as arguing that

integral of 1 in respect to x = x

There are infinite ways to represent the integral of 1 in respect to x and x is indeed one of them but so is x + c where c is not dependent on x.

It is possible for a mouse/trackpad to be equivalent to a pen-mode tablet if and only if you establish a bijective map from your screen to your table/trackpad and always starts your stylus/mouse at the preimage of the point where your cursor is currently at on your screen. While this is theoretically possible, its practically impossible (For all intensive purposes we might as well say it's JUST impossible).

You may be able to accomplish things SIMILAR to a tablet with a trackpad/tablet but the way the cursor location is computed is fundamentally different regardless of how a pen-mode tablet user uses their tablet.

Side note: tablets do have a mode that allows them to function similar to a trackpad which is useful since many games don't have support for bijective cursor mapping (scrolling requires a velocity vector in most implementations). I am not entire sure how mouse-mode works for tablets but I would imagine it calculates velocity as (change in position) / (polling rate * sensitivity). If this is the case then it takes the first discreet signal it receives from your pen to be the zeroing point for position the same way a mouse would.

With that said, using a pen-mode tablet gives you an additional layer of muscle memory to work with because your hand will always be positioned in roughly the same way on the tablet in order to position the pen where it needs for the cursor to be in the correct location on the screen.

Disclaimer: I have not done research into the specifics of mouse sensor technology and am making an analog to sonar technology which is applied in most wave sensor technology.

TL;DR: Stop pretending you know what you are talking about when you clearly don't.

chainpullz wrote:

Disclaimer: I have not done research into the specifics of mouse sensor technology and am making an analog to sonar technology which is applied in most wave sensor technology.

That's actually pretty good - except that you can't make use of the Doppler effect because you're not moving your mouse with a million meters per second. Instead, the mouse creates an image of what's underneath the sensor each time it's polled and then calculates the offset between those two images and with that the velocity the mouse is moving with. The properties of mouse vs tablet cursor movements are just as you described though.

Saphirshroom wrote:

chainpullz wrote:

Disclaimer: I have not done research into the specifics of mouse sensor technology and am making an analog to sonar technology which is applied in most wave sensor technology.

That's actually pretty good - except that you can't make use of the Doppler effect because you're not moving your mouse with a million meters per second. Instead, the mouse creates an image of what's underneath the sensor each time it's polled and then calculates the offset between those two images and with that the velocity the mouse is moving with. The properties of mouse vs tablet cursor movements are just as you described though.

In that case it uses the same basic idea as methods that are able to leverage the doppler effect by essentially measuring the offset. It makes sense that for high enough velocity waves our sensor technology lacks the precision. As stated, this doesn't change the properties of mouse vs tablet cursor movements because we are still integrating a velocity to find a change in distance to add to some constant (the previous location of the mouse).

Now what if I told you there are three different types of mouse sensors?

ZenithPhantasm wrote:

Now what if I told you there are three different types of mouse sensors?

Optical mouse sensors are the only ones relevant to this discussion. If you use a non optical mouse for osu! I can't help but pity you.

The tablet does not operate as a bijection, tablets have a resolution specified by X number of lines per inch, and because the game is rendered with a vertical resolution much lower than the total available resolution on the area of your tablet. The function that maps your tablet area into your screen area will not form a bijection. There are multiple coordinates on the tablet that will map onto the same pixel, thus the function is not surjective.

theLiminator wrote:

The tablet does not operate as a bijection, tablets have a resolution specified by X number of lines per inch, and because the game is rendered with a vertical resolution much lower than the total available resolution on the area of your tablet. The function that maps your tablet area into your screen area will not form a bijection. There are multiple coordinates on the tablet that will map onto the same pixel, thus the function is not surjective.

If you ignore the rounding errors it's a bijection and I'm pretty sure it's also programmed as such.

chainpullz wrote:

ZenithPhantasm wrote:

Now what if I told you there are three different types of mouse sensors?

Optical mouse sensors are the only ones relevant to this discussion. If you use a non optical mouse for osu! I can't help but pity you.

sensei wasnt bad honestly. just 2.9k dpi thats all

theLiminator wrote:

The tablet does not operate as a bijection, tablets have a resolution specified by X number of lines per inch, and because the game is rendered with a vertical resolution much lower than the total available resolution on the area of your tablet. The function that maps your tablet area into your screen area will not form a bijection. There are multiple coordinates on the tablet that will map onto the same pixel, thus the function is not surjective.

That's injectivity not surjectivity. The map can easily be written as a composite function of a bijective map and a rounding function. Discrete maps are uninteresting anyways.

OopOops, meant to say not injective*.

chainpullz wrote:

TorretDunker wrote:

This is my second shot at this thread. The first try had issues with immaturity and lack of knowledge.

1) I know the difference between a tablet and a trackpad. I understand absolute vs relative mapping. This thread is about gameplay choices not technical differences..

Except you clearly don't. A trackpad is just a fancy mouse. A tablet is either a trackpad or a map depending on whether you have it in mouse or pen mode.

A mouse operates as a function on a vector by sending and receiving discreet light waves and using the Doppler effect to determine a velocity vector. It then runs this vector through the function to determine how much it should move your cursor and in which direction. This function integrates the velocity vector with respect to the polling rate and the constant term is exactly the current location of the cursor.

A tablet operates as a bijection from a chosen subspace of your tablet area into a chosen subspace of your monitor area. When your tablet receives a signal from your pen it immediately draws the cursor at the corresponding location on your screen in the next frame. Hovering or dragging does not change how this works.

The key difference between hovering/dragging with a pen and using a trackpad (which functions the same way a mouse does) is in the math behind the cursor calculation. To say they are the same would be the same as arguing that

integral of 1 in respect to x = x

There are infinite ways to represent the integral of 1 in respect to x and x is indeed one of them but so is x + c where c is not dependent on x.

It is possible for a mouse/trackpad to be equivalent to a pen-mode tablet if and only if you establish a bijective map from your screen to your table/trackpad and always starts your stylus/mouse at the preimage of the point where your cursor is currently at on your screen. While this is theoretically possible, its practically impossible (For all intensive purposes we might as well say it's JUST impossible).

You may be able to accomplish things SIMILAR to a tablet with a trackpad/tablet but the way the cursor location is computed is fundamentally different regardless of how a pen-mode tablet user uses their tablet.

Side note: tablets do have a mode that allows them to function similar to a trackpad which is useful since many games don't have support for bijective cursor mapping (scrolling requires a velocity vector in most implementations). I am not entire sure how mouse-mode works for tablets but I would imagine it calculates velocity as (change in position) / (polling rate * sensitivity). If this is the case then it takes the first discreet signal it receives from your pen to be the zeroing point for position the same way a mouse would.

With that said, using a pen-mode tablet gives you an additional layer of muscle memory to work with because your hand will always be positioned in roughly the same way on the tablet in order to position the pen where it needs for the cursor to be in the correct location on the screen.

Disclaimer: I have not done research into the specifics of mouse sensor technology and am making an analog to sonar technology which is applied in most wave sensor technology.

TL;DR: Stop pretending you know what you are talking about when you clearly don't.

Very correct. I don't have anything higher than a high school education in calculus and physics and therefore I have no clue what you are talking about. I know when I said stuff like "If you don't know what you are talking about don't post." I sounded a bit like I was trying to say I knew everything but I wasn't. You didn't see the last thread. I had people commenting that you couldn't use styli on trackpads. I was just trying to avoid a repeat of that. The purpose of this post was to see if using a stylus on a trackpad with acceleration turned off is essentially the same as using a tablet IF the tablet playstyle involves hovering or dragging. From what others have posted it is clear that tablet users all hover or drag and the only difference between playing on a tablet and a trackpad is unavoidable hardware acceleration and a lower resolution (neither of which seem to be important enough at my low level to justify getting a tablet). All I wanted was to get a better understanding of tablet user's playstyle and compare trackpads and tablets. I didn't come here for hate and I definitely didn't come here to be repeatedly told that the difference between a tablet and trackpad is that one has relative mapping and the other has absolute mapping. That was all I was trying to avoid with my messages at the beginning.