WoW frame step bug / micro stuttering
 

Hello,

There was a topic with that issue years ago, I can't find it now.

Let zoom out your view to max range in the game and let the camera lens align / touch an object. Then, if you try to turn with the mouse even extremely slowly it reveals there isn't smooth turning in WoW at all.

This video describes it better than my English:
https://vimeo.com/156337919

I think this caused my micro stuttering when turning the camera in the game normally. I heard this issue is since the launch of WoW, it's the technical limitation of the game, and probably there's nothing to do with it.

I would like to ask, however, if there is *any* way (addon, script, etc) to make the camera turnings as smooth as possible.

Mouse movement at the hardware level isn't smooth either. The only way to render smooth movement is to buffer the change in mouse cursor position and apply the change over time. This can cause a problem in its own right by introducing what's known as input lag. This is how long it takes for the game to catch up to movements made with the mouse or inputs from any other device.

That being said, addons don't have the ability to change the way the game renders the world. Also, the lack of movement smoothing isn't really an "issue". The game is working as intended and just doesn't have this feature.



PS: This isn't anything close to micro-stuttering. Micro-stuttering is entirely a GPU problem and very rarely has anything to do with the game engine itself. It's when frames are delivered to your monitor slightly out of order and causes a jitter effect as a result when moving. This is a more common occurrence when running in multi-GPU setups. Micro-stuttering is identified by brief and often frequent appearances of frames that seem to have moved the picture backwards before jumping forward in time.

Sorry, I used the wrong term "micro-stuttering", I wanted to describe the camera jerkiness I have while I turn the camera when playing the game normally.

So there's nothing I can do to make it smoother?

Display your FPS. If it is below 30 then no.

But imo your issue is that you are moving the camera via strafing. You could just turn the mouse to move the camera.

In the past I've found that shadow quality can dramaticaly effect fps. the higher the quality*the number of things with shadows in your field of view, especially when turning, will kill your frame rate. This will probably be the same with other effects like terrain density etc.

This isn't a FPS problem. The character isn't strafing either. He's far away in the center of the screen on a mount with a mob walking around him. If you look at the video, the mob animation is smooth enough while he's showing an example of what he's talking about.

In my observation while making my custom flight HUD, when you slightly turn using mouselook, there's a minimum delta of anywhere between 0.15° and 0.30°. When you have the camera zoomed out with an object near the camera as opposed to the focal point, this can be a large distance covered as shown in the video. Again, this is just how the game was made a decade ago.

Given a distance X from a point P.

The delta camera value per radian will increased based on distance from the camera if the camera movement is fixed to discrete steps. This however depends on engine implementation.

I would draw pretty pictures but I'm a programmer so I can't

This is exactly as I was explaining.