Friday, January 4, 2008

Danger Mouse

How much can you say about one run through Botanica?

Wednesday night, my magical action bars were back. A few pulls into the run in Botanica, and my main action bar and my right action bar swapped, thus making my keyboard number presses open silly things like a smelting window. I tried a variety of interface settings, /reloadui, and manual tweaking. Nothing fixed it, but logging out and in did fix it. When I got back in, bars back to normal.

A little while later, whamo, happened again.

This time, I had my sherlock holmes cap on, and noticed something.

Recently, I got a new Logitech MX 518 mouse. I like it for the two thumb buttons, as well as the 3 extra index finger buttons.

I mapped my microphone push-to-talk button to one of the thumbkins.

It would appear that the problem happened right as I was talking. Not everytime I toggled the mic, but this time was in the heat of battle, so perhaps it was conflicting with another command I was giving at the time.

So I logged, fixed my bars, and continued. A little later, same thing. During battle, toggle mic, whamo.

This time I replaced the mouse with the old one.

Finish the instance with no repeats of the problem. I went to bed with the sad feeling that my new mouse is the problem. And my dog ate part of the cardboard packaging, so returning it to the store would require a little bamboozling and tapdancing.

But, as I write this blog, a new idea pops into my head.

While I was setting up my mouse buttons, and mapping them to various actions and commands, I had to pick some keyboard mappings for each of the mouse buttons.

Not really knowing what would be a good idea, I just randomly chose some obscure button combinations such as Ctl-Shift-{ and Ctl-Shift-} and others like that.

So now, while I'm writing this, I wonder if pressing the microphone button simulates holding down my Ctl and Shift keys, and then the { doesn't do anything other than toggle my microphone, but if I'm in the heat of battle, and just trapped my mob, and I'm strafing across the screen to drop my new trap, and I press 4 to fire an arcane shot at the skull while on the move. Could perhaps Ctl-Shift-4 or Ctl-Shift-q mean something to WoW, while Ctl-Shift-{ doesn't mean anything other than what I mapped it to?

I suppose I know what I'll be testing out tonight when I log in.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You may find it easier to try some keyboard testing program that will display pressed keys (and preferrably log them as well!), and use your mouse as if you were "playing" and see what keypresses/combos you get out of it. Then check those manually one at a time in WoW and see their effect.

Also, if you use some bar related add-ons, check their keyboard mappings as well...

Anonymous said...

Or try tweaking in the logitechs setpoint utility, i personally use uberoptions mod for setpoint which makes it absolutely customizable...just added keyboard strokes on all buttons and mapped these strokes in wow,sure you can find some unused like ¨)-.,ů§ú\ (just my czech keyboard)
just dont map them to ctrl+shift+whatever as it will produce lots and lots of problems like youre experiencing