Urban Terror Aim Settings Basics

This is a long awaited post. There are a few variables that you can use to improve your mouse precision besides sensitivity. These variables can really help, in conjuntion with a good mouse to improve your aim skills. Today we are going to take a look just at the basics, since the topic is really huge, to help you getting familiar with them so you will be able to skip to more advanced stuff later.

Overcome Software Limitations

I play with perhaps the worst configuration possible: an Apple Mighty Mouse (which is NOT for gaming) and Mac OS X. Why is the worst configuration possible? Because playing with a Mighty Mouse feels like playing the mouse of my old Amiga 500 and Mac OS X applies some adjustments to the pointer movements that you cannot change, unless using appropriate software.

Mac OS X

Mac OS X messes around with the accelleration of your mouse, in order to make more comfortable its use for everyday tasks. When it comes to gaming, accelleration is just an uncontrolled variable. Basically what accelleration does is making easier to do wide movements by calculating your movements and adjusting the cursor speed accordingly. It’s mathematic stuff. What actually means in a gaming prospective is that equal movements of your hand will not always result in the equal movements of your pointer. It’s just too random to rely on. To disable the built in accelleration in Mac OS X you have to use certain software like SteerMouse that will hugely expand your mouse options.

Windows

It’s more easy when it comes to disable the mouse accelleration under Windows. Go to the Control Panel, Mouse and disable “Enhance Pointer Precision”. This will disable MOST of the accelleration. Windows still leaves some accelleration like Mac OS X does. To overcome this problem there’s a registry fix.

Mouse Drivers

If your mouse comes with drivers, install them. Most of the time it will come also with a dedicated control panel where you can change a lot of settings, change the Dots per Inch and so on.

Warning!

Disabling the mouse accelleration is perhaps the most drastical change you could make. It might require some time to get used to the new settings. I suggest to do so only if you are kind of serious about Urban Terror. If you’re just a casual player or you share your computer with others, consider leaving mouse accelleration where it is.

Let’s get it started

We are going to set up some crucial variables for aim settings. To do so you can edit your autoexec.cfg file (which is located in your UrT directory) or edit these value directly via the console. The choice is yours.

The variables are the following.

• \sensitivity – Which is pretty much self explanatory. It’s the value that you can edit also from the controls menu. The default value is set to 5. In my post about how to improve your accuracy I said that the lower, the better. I suggest finding your ideal value which depends on a lot of factors including screen resolution. Mine is actually 11.5 (but again I’m under Mac OS X so yours might be much lower).
• \cl_mouseaccel – The accelleration value inside Urban Terror. This is not dependent to your system configuration. If you shut off the accelleration under Windows but you still have this variable to any positive value, you will still suffer from accelleration randomness. This is a long debated topic.
  A lot of player will suggest you to turn it off completely by setting it to 0. Other players say that having some accelleration is less stressfull for your hand. If you choose to use this value keep it very low. Anything between 0.05 and 0.5 is acceptable.
• \m_pitch – This controls the sensitivity of the mouse movements in the Y-Axis. Urban Terror lets you to keep different values for the X and the Y axis. It might be helpful to lower this value in order to increase your accuracy if you are trying to aim at a specific spot (like searching for headshots). Default value is 0.022 , mine is 0.018.
• \m_yaw – This controls the sensitivity of the mouse movements in the X-Axis. I found this value to be fine at its default value which is 0.022.

There are two other values “m_forward” and “m_side” but I found them to be very hard to set up and I haven’t seen any improvement on changing them so, leave them there unless you know what are you doing.

To change this variables in the console all you have to do is type the variable and the new value. Typing only the variable will return it’s current value and the default value.

Example:
\sensitivity – Will return the current value plus the default value
\sensitivity 10 – Will set the sensitivity to 10

To edit this value in the autoexec.cfg, add the following inside the file.

Example:
setA sensitivity “7″ – Will set the sensitivity to 7
setA cl_mouseaccell “1″ – Will set the accelleration of the mouse to 1

Like I said, these are “basic” stuff. There’s a lot stuff to talk about like USB port overclocking and more and we might cover up some of these in further posts.
Also we are planning Mouse and Mouse Pad reviews so stay tuned.
But remember: this is very subjective stuff. My configuration will not work for you because I don’t have your same mouse, screen resolution, mouse pad, hand size and so on. There’s no perfect configuration. I gave you some advices so perhaps you can change some values and find the perfect one for you.
As a general advice: don’t expect quick results. Don’t expect to open Urban Terror, set the Accelleration to .25 and start killing everybody. Some changes needs time to get used to and only time can really tell if a change is worth or not.
What are your opinion on aim settings? Which do you use? Which would you suggest? Tell us in the comments!

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