Reading this article "Taking Advantage of High-Definition Mouse Movement" - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee418864(v=vs.100).aspx, I surmise that one should use raw input for more precise readings from input devices.
The article states that WM_MOUSEMOVE's primary disadvantage is that it is limited to the screen resolution.
Upon close inspection of the RAWMOUSE structure I see that lLastX and lLastY are long values and you get the delta via them.
To me it looks like WM_MOUSEMOVE and WM_INPUT is the same except with WM_INPUT you do not get acceleration (pointer ballistics) applied.
Are both WM_MOUSEMOVE and WM_INPUT limited to the screen resolution?
If so, what is the benefit of using WM_INPUT?
RAWMOUSE gives you logical coordinates for the mouse based on the mouse's native resolution.
That is, you see the actual movement of the mouse.
Windows will use the mouse speed and acceleration (ballistics) settings to update the cursor position. Because of course the two are not linked - the apparent movement of the mouse must be interpreted to generate a cursor movement else how can more than one mouse be supported?
If you wish to control a pointer, as far as I can tell there is no reason to duplicate the Windows mouse ballistics calculations. Just let windows do it. Therefore for controlling the pointer, you should just use WM_MOUSEMOVE. That is, unless you wish to disable the mouse acceleration settings in your application.
However, if you want to control the player's POV (point of view), or use the mouse to control an in-game object such as a spaceship flight yoke, then the RAWMOUSE data gives you the best possible access to the movement of the mouse, and you can implement your own algorithm to convert that into flight yoke/POV movement.
The main benefit and reason to use it is that that with rawInput you can use two mouses or more. Presently I write small game prototype which is designed to be played by two players with two mouses/mices - It is more complicated but It works and it is not bad because I do nod need to link external libs.
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I want to have my code read the movement of the mouse and act accordingly, for example, if you are moving your mouse up, you print the mouse is moving up in the console and sort of like that. (I am using Windows 10.)
The problem is, I could find a lot of articles that take the coordinates of the mouse cursor, but couldn't find one that deals with the real raw mouse input. The reason I want to do it this way is that when your cursor hits the border and cannot go further, the cursor position wouldn't change and the program won't recognize the mouse movement even though the mouse is "physically" moving. Another problem is that certain programs can "lock" your cursor to stay in a fixed position. For example, most FPS games do that.
Therefore, I wanted to get the raw input that the sensor of the mouse gives to the computer and utilize them instead of cursor position.
Therefore, I wanted to get the raw input that the sensor of the mouse gives to the computer and utilize them instead of cursor position.
Use the Raw Input API for that. Call RegisterRawInputDevices() to register the target mouse device(s) you want to monitor (there could be multiple connected to the PC), and then handle WM_INPUT messages containing the raw input data from the mouse(s).
I searched, but most posts are just telling me what I already have, so below is basically my code right now:
DIKeyboard->Acquire();
DIMouse->Acquire();
DIMouse->GetDeviceState(sizeof(DIMOUSESTATE), &mouseCurrState);
DIKeyboard->GetDeviceState(sizeof(keyboardState),(LPVOID)&keyboardState);
MousePos.x += mouseCurrState.lX;
MousePos.y += mouseCurrState.lY;
Any post telling me how to get absolute position just says to use those last two lines. But my program is windowed, and the mouse can start anywhere on the screen.
i.e. If my mouse happens to be in the centre of my screen, that becomes position 0,0. I basically just want the top left of my window (not my screen) to be my 0,0 mouse coordinates, but am having a hard time finding anything relevant.
Thanks for any help! :)
Following the discussion in the comments, you'll have to decide which method works best for you. Unfortunately, having never worked with DirectInput, I do not know the ins-and-outs of it.
However, Window Messages work best for RTS-style controls, where a cursor is drawn to screen. This is due to the fact that this respects user settings, such as mouse acceleration and mouse speed, whereas DirectInput only uses the driver settings (so not the control panel settings). The user will expect the mouse to feel the same, especially in windowed mode.
DirectInput works better for FPS-style controls, when there is no cursor drawn, as window messages give you only the cursor coordinates, and not offset values. This means that once you are at the edge of the screen, window messages will no longer allow you to detect the mouse being moved further (actually, I am not 100% sure on this, so if someone could verify, please feel free to comment).
For keyboard, I would definitely suggest window messages, because DirectInput offers no advantages, and WM input is easier to use, and quite powerful (the WM_KEYDOWN messages contains a lot of useful data), and it'll allow you (via TranslateMessage) to get good text input, adjusted to locale, etc.).
Solving your problem with DirectInput:
You could probably use GetCursorPos followed by ScreenToClient to initialise your MousePos structure. I'm guessing you'll need to redo this every time you lose mouse input and reacquire it.
Hybrid solution (for RTS like controls):
It might be possible to use a hybrid solution for the mouse if you desire RTS-like controls. If this is the case, I suggest, though I have not tested this, to use WM for the movement of the mouse, which avoids the need for workaround mentioned above, and only use DirectInput to detect additional mouse buttons.
Now one thing I think you should do in such a hybrid approach is not directly use the button when you detect it via DirectInput, but rather post a custom application message to your own message queue (using PostMessage and WM_APP) with the relevant information. I suggest this because using WM you do not get the real-time state of the mouse & keyboard, but rather the state at the time of the message. Posting a message that the button was pressed allows you to handle the extra buttons in the same state-dependent manner (I don't know how noticeable this 'lag' effect is). It also makes the entire input handling very uniform, as every bit of input with this enters as a window message.
At the moment I simply use the WM_MOUSEMOVE message, but it limits the mouse movement to the maximum resolution. So what's the best way of capturing the mouse with Win32 (on a OpenGl window)? I don't want to use freeglut or any extra library.
For games and realtime DirectInput is very suitable, it's moderately hard to use.
That is not core win32 api, the winapi way of getting the input is either GetCursorPos/SetCursorPos driven by your own update loop, so you query and reset with your own frequency.
Or SetCapture and then upon WM_MOUSEMOVE you call SetCursorPos.
The point of setting the cursor pos is to give room for movement so you can get the delta, the amount the cursor moved since the last update and then put it back the cursor into the center of your window.
If you want to be able to capture mouse events after the mouse has existed the window, then you might want to look into the SetCapture function
If your problem is that you want to make a FPS game and you want your character to be able to spin in a continuous motion, then you want to set the mouse position to the center of the window after each mouse move event and handle input based on the difference between the position of the cursor when the mouse move event is fired and the center of the screen. To set the position of the mouse you can use the SetCursorPos function.
Your best bets are to either use DirectInput (which can be a bit of a pain to set up) or RawInput.
There is a fairly comprehensive example available in the Using RawInput page (See example 2).
How can I retrieve the top window of which the cursor is on top of in the X11 server?
The window doesn't have to be ”active” (selected, open, whatever), it just has to have the cursor floating on top of it.
Thanks in advance.
You can use XQueryPointer() to get the mouse position. Then get a window list using XQueryTree(). XQueryTree() returns the window list in proper z-order so you can just loop through all the windows until you find one whose bounding box is under the pointer, XGetWindowAttributes() will give you everything you need to figure out the bounding box. I'm not sure what you would do with shaped windows though.
I haven't work with X11 for a few years so this might be a rather clunky approach but it should work. I also don't have my O'Reilly X11 books anymore, you'll want to get your hands on book one of that series if you're going to work with low level X11 stuff; I think the whole series is available for free online these days.
I haven't programmed X11 for over a decade, so forgive me if I get this wrong.
I believe you can register for mouse movement events on your windows. If you handle such event by storing the window handle in some variable or other, and then handling the event so it doesn't percolate down the tree, then at the time you want to identify the window you can just query the variable.
However this will only work when the mouse is over a window you have registered a suitable event handler for, so you won't know about windows belonging to other applications - unless there is a way to register for events on other people's windows which may be possible.
The advantage over the other answer is that you don't have to traverse the whole tree. The disadvantage is that you need to handle a great many mouse movement events, and it may not work to find other people's windows.
I believe there may also be mouse enter and mouse leave events too which would reduce the amount of processing required.
I'm currently writing a c++ console application that grabs the mouse position at regular intervals and sends it to another visual application where it is used to drive some 3d graphics in real time. The visual app is closed source and cannot be altered outside it's limited plug-in functionality.
Currently I'm using the GetCursorPos() function which is easy and fast enough, but I'm running into the issue that all of the data is clipped based on the current screen resolution of 1920x1600 so that all x values are between 0 and 1920 and all y values are between 0 and 1600 no matter how far the mouse is physically moved.
I need to get the mouse position before it's clipped at the edge of the screen, or possibly the deltas which I could use to calculate the current position.
I've seen some references to the windows MouseMove event but I would really not want to implement a window to make it work or especially have it as the active to receive those events.
I'm working in a windows environment and a language change is not feasible.
I might be wrong, but in Win32 land you don't get mouse move messages when the mouse is at the edge of the screen because, well, the mouse isn't moving. The usual way to get an infinite mouse area is to do the following:
Hide the mouse, get exclusive access and record position
Centre mouse to window
When mouse moves, get delta from centre of screen to current position
Centre mouse to window again
The next mouse move should have a delta of (0,0), so ignore it
Go to 3 until end of mouse move operation
Reset position, show the mouse and release exclusive access
If you didn't hide the mouse, then you'd see the mouse moving a small distance and then snapping back to the centre position, which looks nasty.
This method does require a message pump for the mouse move messages so the console application idea probably won't work with this. Can you create a full screen invisible window for grabbing the mouse?
Just get the position, and move it to the center and return the delta yourself
This is how FPS games do it
I don't have any direct experience with raw input, which is probably what you need to tap into. According to MSDN, you have to register the device, then setup your winproc to accept the WM_INPUT messages and then do your calculations based on the raw data.
Here's another relevant link.