Why is game sensitivity not affected by resolution change?(CS:GO)

[AstroBenny]

I was wondering whether in-game resolution (specifically CS:GO) affects your sensitivity because I understand that the reason many people use a higher DPI when using a 4K monitor is because there are more pixels to cover compared to a regular 1080P display and therefore need to increase DPI in order to increase sensitivity to an equivalent level. However, when I compared 720P and 1080P on my display in CS:GO with the same sens and DPI, the viewmodel would still be looking at exactly the same place when I did a full sweep from the edge of the mouse mat to the other...

Surely, when using lower resolutions (720P) it would increase the sensitivity because you have less pixels to cover for the DPI you've set compared to higher resolutions...

What am I missing...?

[minibois]

Game engines don't work in pixels, just like you can tell them not to work in fps. Many games are fps bound (such as some NFS was bound to fps and increasing fps would make you move way faster), but there are aspects that are not fps bound too.

Game engines usually just have a formula for rotating your character that is not bound to pixels, but rather just a rotation value.

 

TL;DR: it is because the movement is not bound to pixels.

[Naeaes]

There are two methods. This applies to more than game development. Web design is one major thing. For each step of moving the mouse, you can either move/turn/whatever a number of pixels/voxels/whatever. That methods ends up being affected by the resolution. But you can also  move/turn/whatever a percentage of the width/height or a number of degrees. These scale way better for varying resolutions and screen ratios.

[Stadin6]

i think it might work like 1 dot moved = 1 degree in the game

[AstroBenny]

45 minutes ago, Naeaes said:

There are two methods. This applies to more than game development. Web design is one major thing. For each step of moving the mouse, you can either move/turn/whatever a number of pixels/voxels/whatever. That methods ends up being affected by the resolution. But you can also  move/turn/whatever a percentage of the width/height or a number of degrees. These scale way better for varying resolutions and screen ratios.

What do you mean when you say you can move as a "percentage" of the width/height?

[AstroBenny]

48 minutes ago, Minibois said:

Game engines don't work in pixels, just like you can tell them not to work in fps. Many games are fps bound (such as some NFS was bound to fps and increasing fps would make you move way faster), but there are aspects that are not fps bound too.

Game engines usually just have a formula for rotating your character that is not bound to pixels, but rather just a rotation value.

 

TL;DR: it is because the movement is not bound to pixels.

Why do some games have varying sensitivity depending on frame rate? Is it just a flaw in the engine?

[minibois]

4 minutes ago, AstroBenny said:

Why do some games have varying sensitivity depending on frame rate? Is it just a flaw in the engine?

You can either make your game behave based on fps, or you can make it not.

If you do make it based on fps, the movement is a little bit like "if in frame 1 the W key is pressed, the character moves 1 unit forward" same for all the rest of the frames. If you have 60fps, this function is done 60 times a second, while if you have 144fps, this is done 144 times a second. So with 60fps, you move 60 units per second and with 144fps, you move 144 units per second.

This is can be the same with mouse sensitivity, but it depends on how the game does mouse sensitivity. If it just sees the position of the mouse and translates that to a rotation in the game, it's fine. If it does some weird stuff, it can be weird (and I would consider that a flaw in the engine/code)

[Naeaes]

1 minute ago, AstroBenny said:

What do you mean when you say you can move as a "percentage" of the width/height?

Like instead of saying (in programming code) "move 400 pixels left" you say "move [screen width] / 5 left". Both have almost the same end result if the screen is 1920 pixels wide, but the first one will break your code if the screen is only 320px wide. I do stuff like this all the time in GUI design to avoid crazy stuff like moving a button outside the screen. 

[AstroBenny]

21 hours ago, Naeaes said:

Like instead of saying (in programming code) "move 400 pixels left" you say "move [screen width] / 5 left". Both have almost the same end result if the screen is 1920 pixels wide, but the first one will break your code if the screen is only 320px wide. I do stuff like this all the time in GUI design to avoid crazy stuff like moving a button outside the screen. 

 

21 hours ago, Minibois said:

You can either make your game behave based on fps, or you can make it not.

If you do make it based on fps, the movement is a little bit like "if in frame 1 the W key is pressed, the character moves 1 unit forward" same for all the rest of the frames. If you have 60fps, this function is done 60 times a second, while if you have 144fps, this is done 144 times a second. So with 60fps, you move 60 units per second and with 144fps, you move 144 units per second.

This is can be the same with mouse sensitivity, but it depends on how the game does mouse sensitivity. If it just sees the position of the mouse and translates that to a rotation in the game, it's fine. If it does some weird stuff, it can be weird (and I would consider that a flaw in the engine/code)

Thanks for the insight; makes sense now!

 

Do you know why Field of view affects sensitivity? I notice that in several games like COD if you use a FOV changer, the higher the FOV, the higher the sensitivity. For example when my FOV was set to 90 on MW2, I could complete almost two full turns from one edge of my mouse mat to the other. However, with the default FOV of 65, a full sweep of the mouse mat yields just over a 360 degree turn in-game. Why is this?

[minibois]

15 minutes ago, AstroBenny said:

 

Thanks for the insight; makes sense now!

 

Do you know why Field of view affects sensitivity? I notice that in several games like COD if you use a FOV changer, the higher the FOV, the higher the sensitivity. For example when my FOV was set to 90 on MW2, I could complete almost two full turns from one edge of my mouse mat to the other. However, with the default FOV of 65, a full sweep of the mouse mat yields just over a 360 degree turn in-game. Why is this?

I have not really tweaked/done a lot with FOV in game engines but I would assume their sensitivity is somehow based on FOV. 

Maybe it sees the left and right side of the screen and assumes "if the player moves the mouse x amount to the left, the crosshair should be located on the very left side of the screen of what they can see now"