Same here...
i don't think it is that weird honestly; even if you are in front at a flat screen, the brain register the difference between pointing directly at something (with the weapon drawn in front of you, the crosshair, whatever...) versus the act of issuing an indirect pitching command to a control stick (even if emulated by a mouse instead of a real joystick)

What confuses me a bit are those flight sims that show an actual cursor on screen when you opt for mouse control... in those case i usually don't invert the axis and follow the crossairs like in a shooter.

Sticks, whether of the thumb or joy variety -> inverted Y axis.
Mouse -> normal.
Keys -> no idea, really, although I suspect I would go with inverted here as well.

Things where I'm controlling a vehicle, inverted.
First person shooters, normal.
Third person games... it depends whether the camera revolves around the character (in which case I want up to make the camera rise and look downwards), or whether the camera pivots in place from behind the character (in which case I want up to look up).

Everything inverted, everywhere.
Cars, planes, bikes, walking, etc.
Mouses, joypads, joysticks...

In every game i play, i go to the options, look for anything with "inverted" and turn it on. :)

Outch, inverted X just sounds painful.

Lol, i forgot about X.
But are only a few games that alows to invert X

X normal
Y inverted


Y inverted has a more natural feelling for me.

if the monitor is your eyes, so your mouse behind the monitor controls the 'head'.
And so, its like your'e controlling a head with your hand. So if you pull the head back the eyes will look up...

...that's an option?

Invert Y always. X Never.

Well, at least we're weird in the same way then. ;)

Like someone else said, even with a mouse on a FPS game, pulling the mouse down, or rather, back, feels the same as pulling my head backwards in order to look up.

I think with third person view games it makes even more sense in a way: in order to tilt the view behind the character upwards, I need to pull the camera behind him down. Or something.

I'm a bit surprised how many different mixes people have though. I originally thought it would be mostly either always, or never, inverted. I just hope games keep offering inverted Y as an option.

On the other hand, I never understood why some games offer also inverted X. Huh?

I might even have an explanation for the mixing.

Apart from "habituation" (old flight games typically used inverted Y-axis without an option to revert it, old FPS games typically used non-inverted Y-axis without an option to invert it, so we grew accustomed to each control method within its own context), there's also the fact that the mouse control substitutes for different things in the two frameworks. In an FPS, mouse movement usually substitutes for head movement. So "up" means indeed "up". In flight games or other games with vehicles, mouse control substitutes for a command to be sent to the vehicle, where "move stick away from me" very often indeed sends the command "down".

First rule of ergonomics, there's a usecase for everything. You just have to find it. ;)

I suppose that left-handed players who use right-handed mouse on an inverted grip might appreciate the option. ;)

I also believe that some real-life applications (microfiche readers? u-boat periscopes?) use an inverted X-axis, so there may be situations where emulating that would increase realism.

I guess. but I think that pulling the mouse backwards (not "down") feels like pulling (tilting) my head backwards in order to look up in a FPS game. Interesting how differently people decipher the controls and how they connect them to what happens on the screen.

About old FPS games not having an option for inverted Y axis... are you sure? I think I used it from the beginning starting from Duke3D. It could be that some FPS games didn't have the invert option at first, but it came in a patch, I dunno.

Anyway, YMMV etc.

I'm not completely sure, my memory may be playing tricks on me. I _am_ fairly certain that "move mouse away to look up" was the standard for FPS games when mouselook was introduced. But I also didn't see a need to look for an option to change this, so I might have forgotten that there was one.

Most FPS games that I played extensively were probably released in the pre-mouselook era, where you had to press keys to change your view angle (Dark Forces).

Edit: Some way to jog the memory if someone's interested in clarifying this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouselook

Edit: I also have a possible explanation how the control scheme for FPS games developed.

The first FPS games had no way to look up or down, and no way to aim higher or lower (in Doom, any height difference between you and the enemy was simply ignored).

Then there were games that allowed you to use the mouse pointer for aiming. Since "Move mouse away" equals "up" in every operating system and almost every application where you can _see_ the mouse cursor, it was logical to implemjent it into these games in the same way.

When mouselook was implemented, people were already accustomed to the idea that they needed to move the mouse away in order to aim at someone higher than them. Though some people also (obviously) preferred an inverted Y-axis, so this option was introduced as well.

That's my theory at least. ;)

No. Definitely not. I'm not even sure I like flight sims inverted. Which might partly explain why I've never really got on with flying-related games.