Simple suggestions to improve the experience on Steam Deck and Controllers

[Jademalo.3724]

I've been playing a lot of the game on the Steam Deck since I got mine, and honestly it's a pretty great experience as is. However, there are a few small tweaks that could be made that would substantially improve the experience hopefully without too much effort.

tl;dr -
- Add an option to the frame limiter to limit to Monitor Refresh Rate like Guild Wars 1
- Add two more keybinds to discretely Enable and Disable the Action Camera
- Add an option to remove the forced smoothing of camera motion in both regular and Action Camera

Frame Limiting
The first is to do with frame limiting. Guild Wars 1 had three options; 30, 60, and Monitor Refresh Rate. However, Guild Wars 2 doesn't have the third option, and instead only has 30 and 60.
One of the best features of the Steam Deck is the ability to limit the refresh rate of the display from anywhere between 40Hz and 60Hz, allowing for a much smoother experience in terms of frametime if you can't quite hit the 60fps target.
Guild Wars 2 feels best to play at 40Hz since it's hard to maintain a stable 60fps on the deck but fairly easy to maintain a stable 40fps. However, since the ingame frame limiter can only be set to 30 or 60, there's no way to lock it at 40 without incurring a huge amount of input latency through either VSync or the Steam Deck's built in frame limiter.
This means that the game is rendering a lot of frames it doesn't need to, wasting battery life and resulting in an inconsistent frame pacing and a less smooth experience. Considering modern monitors also have a huge variety of different refresh rates, this option would be extremely useful generally.
The weirdest thing to me is that it clearly existed in Guild Wars 1, and due to that GW1 runs extremely well on the deck. I'm surprised it's not an option for GW2!

Action Camera Keybinds
Currently, there are two keybinds for the action camera; Toggle Action Camera, and Disable Action Camera. The first swaps the state between standard and Action Camera, and the second is a hold toggle that disables action camera temporarily while it's being held, which means it has a slightly misleading name. Hold Disable Action Camera is probably clearer.
It would be much easier to create keybinding sets based around Action Camera if there were keybinds available specifically to Enable and Disable Action Camera regardless of the current state. As it is now, it's not possible for the binding setup to be sure which state you're actually in, since all it can do is toggle. If a bind didn't go through due to a loading screen or something similar, the state of the keybind set can become desynced from the actual current action camera state, and toggling would continue to have things be desynced.
Having discrete keybinds to enable and disable the action camera would allow for bindings to never desync, since the keybind set could always make sure to return the game state to the correct mode.

Camera Acceleration and Deceleration
This suggestion is probably a lot more work than the above two, but I feel it's worth mentioning as this could also have huge benefits in terms of game feel to Desktop users, not just deck users.
Currently, the camera in game does not move 1:1 with the movement and speed of the mouse. When you start to move the mouse there is a small period of acceleration, and when you stop there is a small period of deceleration. This makes the camera input look smoother, but results in the camera feeling "floaty", unresponsive, and sluggish, especially at lower framerates. This is noticeable in action camera, since it makes precise aiming quite difficult due to the camera and crosshair not responding exactly to your mouse movements, and It's especially noticeable if you whip the camera around quickly. It's also extremely appearent when using gyro aiming, as the micro movements of the gyro get smoothed out and feel very disconnected from your actual input.
Ideally, I would like to see an option to disable this behavior, and have the camera move 1:1 with the movement and speed of the mouse. This would make aiming with Action Camera much easier, and also generally make the camera feel a lot more responsive for the player should they choose, especially at lower framerates. This is one thing I've noticed about GW2's camera compared to a lot of other games, and is the main reason the game can sometimes feel a bit sluggish, regardless of framerate.
EDIT: For some clarification here - I'm not talking about acceleration in the sense of mouse acceleration where faster movements will move the camera further, I'm talking about acceleration of the camera movement such that it smooths out your inputs by slowly ramping up and down the camera speed.

Hopefully these aren't too huge asks, as they would really be great improvements not just to players on the deck, but also controller users generally. The third suggestion would also be a huge benefit to desktop players, especially those using Action Camera.

Hopefully this gets seen by someone, ty!

Edited July 13, 2022 by Jademalo.3724
Clarification on acceleration

[KrHome.1920]

There are some misunderstandings about frame limitation and frame synchronisation on your side. Limiting framerate to refresh rate without having vsync or adaptive sync enabled results in stuttering and (!) tearing.

And if you enable vsync, then you don't need any limiter at all, because vsync is the limiter.

The steam deck can be set to 40 Hz. If you then enable vsync in GW2 and set the fps limiter to unlimited, guess what will happen? The fps are limited and synchronized to 40 - exactly what you want. So why do you want an additional fps limiter at 40 fps? This would only make sense if you plan to disable vsync while having an adaptive sync display, which the steam deck does not have.

Quote

Currently, the camera in game does not move 1:1 with the movement and speed of the mouse. When you start to move the mouse there is a small period of acceleration, and when you stop there is a small period of deceleration. [...] This is especially noticeable in action camera.

This is not (!) true. Camera movement is 100% accurate and has a low latency - at least in Windows and with an adaptive sync display.

I guess what you experience is either

1. input lag which is a result of vsync + a low frame rate (and when I say low I am talking about anything lower than 100 fps - vsync just sucks and should not be a thing in 2022 - the steam deck not supporting adaptive sync is pathetic) or

2. some other latency issue caused by the steam deck OS or some proton emulation stuff in the background or

3. linux mouse acceleration.

What the GW2 camera has and what is intentional, is a small ramp up of a few pixels when you press the right mouse button and move the mouse, but since this is not happening in action camera mode, I guess this is not what you are talking about.

[Jademalo.3724]

Quote

There are some misunderstandings about frame limitation and frame synchronisation on your side. Limiting framerate to refresh rate without having vsync or adaptive sync enabled results in stuttering and (!) tearing.

I've got a fairly decent knowledge of these systems, especially when it comes to the steam deck.

The Gamescope compositor that the Deck uses actually has a built in VSync, so tearing isn't actually even possible on there. However this VSync implementation doesn't restrict the framerate of the game running beneath, so another method has to be used.

A frame limiter absolutely does not result in stuttering. If the game takes longer to render a frame than the refresh rate cycles, then there will be stuttering. In addition, if the game is drawing substantially more frames, you end up with skipped frames which can sometimes reduce the smoothness.
In fact, if there's enough of an overhead such that each frame can comfortably be drawn within each refresh cycle (in this case 40hz/25ms), it can reduce stuttering and improve overall frame pacing.

Quote

And if you enable vsync, then you don't need any limiter at all, because vsync is the limiter.

The steam deck can be set to 40 Hz. If you then enable vsync in GW2 and set the fps limiter to unlimited, guess what will happen? The fps are limited and synchronized to 40 - exactly what you want. So why do you want an additional fps limiter at 40 fps? This would only make sense if you plan to disable vsync while having an adaptive sync display, which the steam deck does not have.

While ingame VSync in GW2 does limit the framerate to the refresh of the display, it also introduces substantial input lag due to its buffer structure, whereas the ingame limiter does not. Since the compositor is already VSyncing, substantial gains in input latency can be made if the ingame limiter is used instead without any tearing issues.
In addition, tearing is sometimes preferable to VSync when you're more concerned about input latency. VSync naturally means that after a frame is drawn by the game there's a period of wait before it gets displayed, which increases input lag.

A frame limiter is not VSync, and there are benefits and tradeoffs for either method. For the steam deck, an ingame limiter is vastly preferrable to VSync. I have tested this myself at 60hz with the 30fps limiter vs VSync, though substantial gains could be made if you could limit to 40 instead, hence the suggestion.

Quote

This is not (!) true. Camera movement is 100% accurate and has a low latency - at least in Windows and with an adaptive sync display.

This is incorrect, and is possible to both test and feel, especially comparing to other games that have responsive cameras.

This isn't just an issue with Linux or the Steam Deck, this is actually even more pronounced with just a basic mouse and keyboard on Windows. All 3 of your examples are absolutely not the cause, and doing exactly the same actions on windows results in exactly the same issues.
The default setup for the deck also doesn't even have any native mouse acceleration, which if anything is an improvement on windows requiring it to be disabled manually. I'm also not describing acceleration here in terms of inconsistent movement ingame for a given distance of the mouse depending on the speed, I'm describing acceleration as the smoothing of the camera when it speeds up or slows down.

Quote

What the GW2 camera has and what is intentional, is a small ramp up of a few pixels when you press the right mouse button and move the mouse, but since this is not happening in action camera mode, I guess this is not what you are talking about.

This is exactly what I'm talking about, and absolutely does apply to action camera.

Whip the mouse round 180 degrees and you can see just how many intermediate frames there are before the camera comes to a complete stop, even in action camera. It's slightly less pronounced in Action Camera, but it's undoubtedly still there.

What I'm asking for is an option to remove that effect entirely, from both RMB hold camera and action camera. It's absolutely the number one culprit for the camera feeling sluggish, and should absolutely be an option to turn off.

Edited July 13, 2022 by Jademalo.3724