Mouse Wheel Scrolling?

[Shiva64]

OK, I have the option turned on and all, but I'm unable to use the wheel to scroll to the left and right. It's been like this for the past few versions (don't remember which version side-wheeling stopped working, sadly. But probably in 1.3.15/16 or so, and I'm using 1.4 now.), and it's bugging me since I liked using the wheel to scroll around. And now I have to use the arrow keys for left and right, which isn't very comfortable for me. Even when I move the mouse to the far left/right, it still won't get it to scroll left/right with the wheel, it just scrolls up/down like left/right wheeling never existed.

OS shouldn't matter too much as it has worked before, but I'm using Win98SE. I have formatted, but the problem was there before I did so. And yes, this is also on a fresh install as I had to format again recently because of a problem (I admit, I did something stupid . Gotta learn somehow!).

Is this just a bug, or was it removed for whatever reason, or something else? Other than that, I have had no other problems and the game runs pretty smoothly on my computer, and it is fairly old.

Edit: And just incase it matters, I play in windowed mode.

[Alink]

Scrolling with mousewheel was changed around 1.3.2, various reasons for that:
- we added support for horizontal mousewheel, which of course imply that the vertical mousewheel must always scroll vertically.
- the previous system was a bit unintuitive. Some players never get used to it or understood how it works, so they assumed that it was buggy/random and stopped using it. I also can't remember any other game or application using this method of mousewheel scrolling.
- it was also imprecise (or buggy). The different areas giving each directions were badly calculated, not obvious and without any visual indications. Thus, to be sure to have the wanted direction, you needed to move the cursor to clear areas (not neat center, corners or diagonals). But then it was a bit redundant with the other mouse scrolling feature (mouse near border of screen/window do a scrolling, activated in advanced options)

So the 1.4 methods for scrolling are:
- arrows keys
- mousewheel = always vertical, alt+mousewheel = horizontal (like some other applications do)
- move mouse near border of screen/window (optional)
- press the middle mouse button: scroll in direction and speed depending of the cursor position relatively to the center of the view. Keep it pressed, allow to tune this when scrolling (a bit similar to the firefox autoscrolling)
- left-click, middle-click or drag&drop in the minimap window
- "next unit" hotkeys (just to be complete )

Note also that the scrolling speed preference has effect on all.

[Shiva64]

Oh well... I've never had any problem with it whatsoever, and I do have some carpal tunnel issues, and it helped a lot instead of reaching over to my arrow keys at an odd angle (yes, the way my area is setup, it's more comfortable to use the mouse than the keyboard). Moving the mouse cursor over to the left/right sides is slow, and it takes a few seconds for the map to start moving... I also don't have a middle button, so that method is out the window.

Guess I'll have to get used to the alt+scroll method.. even though I'm like probably one of the few PC gamers who is not fond of keyboarding, except when absolutely needed. :/ Although I did use the mouse with one hand and some keyboard hotkeys with the other whenever it was comfortable for doing so.

Is there any possible chance in the future it could be implemented again, for those who do prefer it over the other methods? Or have an option for it that you can turn on/off? Or something... I just found it more convenient to be able to scroll with one thing, instead of having to use 'extras'. Oh well.

Other than that, the game is awesome, and I hope it continues to be actively developed for a long time.

[Alink]

A last alternative for you, is to find windows tools allowing to simulate middle click or horizontal mousewheel. It is simple on linux, but probably less for windows98. On the other hand such feature can be useful in general for other applications.

One thing that we can maybe do, is to allow to reconfigure arrow-keys, but need to cleaning this hardcoded part and will be probably not much used.
An other thing is to check why the border scrolling take few second to start on your system. If other scrolling methods are less slow, then there is a bug somewhere.

We generally don't add option for preserving each old feature (for various reasons but the main is to avoid having to support hundredths of them).

[rchandra]

You can probably press the mouse wheel to get the middle-mouse-click effect, which lets you scroll without using keyboard.