mouse pointer hiding in plain sight

This is not a problem with your eyes, it is a problem with the game's design. The cursor is small and has nothing to make it pop out against the background. Alternating its colour from red arrow to blue hand does not help.

A solid black outline of about 3-4 pixels with a bright cursor inside would do wonders, as would a mouse trail.

Before anyone suggests using Windows' built-in mouse cursor trails or similar cursor location features, enabling those results in a massive drop in framerate.

I wish I could just replace whatever graphic is responsible for it, since the developers cannot be relied upon for accessibility in a timely manner (if at all).

Another solution would be to allow usage of the Windows cursor itself, then the user could just install any existing cursor scheme and it would carry over to the game.

This could possibly help some of you...
(no, I'm not going to say GET GLASSES... )

Bind a key for a PopMenu. When you lose your mouse, hit that key and the The PopMenu always appears wherever your mouse is.
Might not really save any time from finding it the hard way of swirling it around until you see it... But... I just figured I'd offer the idea, in case it might!

There are so many wonderful things you can do with the /popmenu command beyond this, but, who knows... maybe it can be of some help for this as well!

(For the record, I have lost where the mouse is a few times as well, hehe!)

Many people, including myself, have posted about this over the past years. No progress yet.

Yay! I'm not alone in losing the mouse cursor!

I'm starting to wonder if the problem is larger monitors. Seems like a lot of us with this problem have them. I have a 20" WS monitor, and lose my mouse cursor in big groups all the time.

[ ProTip: The banner is a link to art refs!! | The Khellection | The HBAS Repository | Brute Guides (4/16/10) | How To Post An Image - A Quick Guide ]
Biggest Troll on the forums? I'll give you a hint:

Yep, I have the same problem. Always seems to happen when the dang Resurrect dialog is prompting me during a run of the weekly task force. :-)

Same problem here, too. I usually end up thrashing the mouse around violently, looking for the wee little cursor before I di-... <thud>

--NT

This is actually even worse when you run dual screens and the game in windowed mode. I've found myself more then a few times clicking again to only be on the edge of the screen which causes the whole game to freeze for a second until you let go because it thinks I'm moving the screen.

Or it clicks off to my other window.

I noticed it mostly on my toons with targeted AOE powers. It can be a pain dropping those at times. A better contrast on the cursor would certainly be nice.

I don't believe it's a technical issue, it's simply that there's so much going on and so many effects the pointer gets lost. I only tend to notice it when I'm being rezzed and I'm trying to click that damned timed "Yes" button and I'm running my mouse around the mat frantically trying to see where it is!!!!!

Thankyou for this thread. It's so glad to know I'm NOT the only one!

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

OKAY!

Until the developers acknowledge the accessibilty problem, I have created replacement cursors.

Preview:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/120706/cursor-sample.png

Download:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/120706/cox_cursors.zip

Installation:
Place the contents of the zip in your CoX folder with the suggested path. If the folders do not exist, you must create them. Fear not! This will not alter your actual CoX installation (like Vidiot Maps). Exit the game, relaunch.

32-bit Windows:
C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\data\texture_library\GUI\Cursors\

64-bit Windows:
C:\Program Files (x86)\City of Heroes\data\texture_library\GUI\Cursors\

The zip contains:

cursor_hand_open.texture
cursor_hand_closed.texture
cursor_point.texture
cursor_select_enemy.texture
cursor_friendly.texture
cursor_select.texture

Junk info:

If you want all your cursors identical (bit for bit), I am sorry. The game has some bizarre checks in place to prevent this. It will even give a warning that having them the same is bad for your health and then refuse to launch. If you change even ONE pixel, it's good to go. Yeah, I don't know, either.

The game APPEARS to expect a certain file size for cursors and will just truncate any data beyond that, so, this is why the pointers are relatively small. If I figure out how to make them bigger, I will let everyone know.

Cool. I'll try this out tonight.

Wonder if there is a /cursorscale command...?

Works nicely so far. Thanks!

See my Guides and Tutorials

i have this issue as well, and since i have a lot of utility powers on my second cursor bar, losing that can be a real problem. i blamed it on my newer g-card which upped my resolution.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

I've had this problem, too. I only started having this happen when I got my new computer, which was last summer, so the "wide-screen monitor" theory sounds plausible as a cause. There's also the fact that I usually use my keyboard for most of my gameplay, like powers, movement, and tabbing through targets (probably a result of growing up playing console games), which means that I don't usually have as much of an incentive to pay attention to where my cursor is, causing problems on those few occasions when I do need to use the cursor to point at something.

As for age, I'm not really that old. Today was my 28th birthday. And BTW, I do wear glasses, which I have on almost constantly (only taking them off when I'm in the shower or in bed), and I still sometimes have trouble seeing where the cursor is. I'm probably due for a new pair, though.

Yeah, the mouse pointer is tiny on a high resolution monitor. Really would be nice to have an option to enlarge the pointer.

I must've done something wrong installing the new cursors, on my laptop (running Win7) I get the following error message:

"Bad rawInfo size of 128 bytes for cursor texture or icon 'cursor_select' of 16x16 size"

All my cursors are a black square when I get this.