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The friction/acceleration awkwardness can be solved by using a physically based timestep-independent formulation, which I implemented in TPMouse[0] and explained its derivation in a previous comment reply[1].

The gist of it is that the solution to a linearly damped particle is a linear system, so the x and y components can be calculated completely independently and the analytic solution is just an exponential of time.

It is a special case of the timestep-independent damped harmonic oscillator, which I previously wrote a blogpost about [10].

Namely it is the "unsprung" special case under "Overdamped"

The very same formulation is also what I used to implement LibreScroll[11] to add inertial scrolling to any mouse.

[0] https://github.com/EsportToys/TPMouse

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Trackballs/comments/ym9q2t/tpmouse_...

[10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35899215

[11] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36783942



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