I would like to be able to display some dynamic text at the mouse
cursor location in a win32 app, for instance to give an X,Y coordinate that
would move with the cursor as though attached. I can do this during a
mousemove event using a TextOut() call for the window at the mouse
coordinates and invalidate a rectange around a stored last cursor position
to clear up the previous output. However this can suffer from flickering and
cause problems with other things being drawn in a window such as tracker
boxes. Is there a better way to do this, perhaps using the existing cursor
drawing/invalidating mechanism ?
You can do this via ToolTips - check out CToolTipCtrl.
If you want flicker free tracking ToolTips then you will need to derive your own classes from CToolTipCtrl that use the trackActivate messages.
You may want to consider a small transparent window that you move to follow the mouse. In particular, since Windows 2000, Layered windows seem to be the weapon of choice (confession: no personal experience there).
You can overwrite OnSetCursor to get a dynamic mouse cursor. I just found a German tutorial.
German tutorial
English translated tutorial
Related
I'm working on a Qt class project. We're supposed to develop an application like Microsoft Paint. Now I don't know how to enlarge a selected part of an image. Actually I don't even know how to "select" an area. You know, just like that on the desktop of Windows, you press the left button of the mouse and than move it, a dashed-line rectangle will show up. I hope to move or zoom in/out this particular area.
Any help will be appreciated, thanks!
It could be done by using mouse events. Here's example that might be useful to you:https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtwidgets-widgets-scribble-example.html
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.
I've been looking around for awhile about how to produce buttons using Direct2D and DirectWrite with no luck. I'm comfortable with shapes, text and that jazz. However, it suddenly occurred to me I might be looking about it in the wrong way.
Take the sentence:
you draw your controls and content for your app using the Direct2D and
DirectWrite APIs, handling all the input events directly.
I'm now thinking this means that instead of being able to quickly produce a fully functional button as I would using XAML. I would draw the button, manually check the location of the mouse on click, whether it's within the button boundaries and then handle the event? Similar method for hovering without the click.
Is this the kind of method required when using Direct2D and DirectWrite?
I haven't any experience with DirectX, but in OpenGL I build my buttons from scratch. Assuming you have animated sprites implemented, your buttons are essentially sprites that play certain animations in response to being clicked, hovered over, etc., and which you can register callbacks with. In my 2D engine, I have a class called UiButton, which inherits Sprite, and listens for various UI events. It gets more complicated when you want to handle keyboard navigation (arrow keys + enter to select) as you have to think about how the buttons are connected and which of them has focus at any given moment.
Here is my implementation for reference:
Headers: https://github.com/RobJinman/dodge/tree/master/Dodge/include/dodge/ui
Source: https://github.com/RobJinman/dodge/tree/master/Dodge/src/ui
If you're not prepared to roll your own, Googling "direct2d gui framework" seems to bring up some promising results.
Sorry I can't be of more help.
Yes, to draw a UI Button with Direct2D, you need to handle everything yourself, why? Direct2D is a 2D graphics API, not controls library. you need to draw the layout of your button, and handle the message of your button(such as click, mouse hover...), you lost lots of convenient and that's time-consuming, but the most important thing is: you can control it by yourself!
Direct2D is a graphics library. UI controls like, Text-selection, Textbox, and Buttons is not a part of it. However the benefits of using Direct2D and DirectWrite is we can implement our own UI controls, and having a full control of it.
Please also see: ID2D1Geometry::FillsContainsPoint() for hit-testing task.
I'm currently using Google Chrome as my main browser. I wondered how the developers put the custom titlebar, because I wanted to incorporate into one of my own applications.
If you guys don't know what I'm talking about, here's a picture:
I found an article about the interface, which is here:http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/vcgeneral/thread/33870516-9868-48d3-ab53-6269d9979598
However, I don't know how to do this. I'm currently using VC++ Express. Can anyone give me step by step instructions and how to get an interface like that? Except I don't want tabs on top.
I'm writing this in Win32.
If memory serves, the main things you need to handle aren't WM_NCCALCSIZE, but WM_NCHITTEST and WM_NCPAINT.
WM_NCHITTEST is what tells the system when the cursor is over the title bar, so you need to take a cursor position and decide whether it's over the area you consider "title bar". In particular, if the user clicks and drags with the cursor in this area, the whole window gets dragged.
WM_NCPAINT is just like WM_PAINT except for the non-client area -- i.e., this is when you need to actually draw whatever you're going to for the title bar (and window borders, if memory serves).
I should add that I haven't played with this in quite a while. There's almost certainly more I'm not remembering right now.
OK, the answer is simple:
Chomre simply does not use the Windows built in functionality for drawing a frame border, titlebar, titlebar buttons, etc..
When you call GetWindowRect(hChromeWindow) and GetClientRect(hChromeWindow) you will notice that the rectangles are identical. This means that Chrome turns off all Windows functionality for drawing a border (simply return 0 in WM_NCCALSIZE without doing anything else) and then they draw EVERYTHING into the client area.
So in WM_PAINT they draw the titlebar and the upper part of the window (URL bar, tabs, etc..) together. In WM_NCPAINT they do nothing.
This is not the common way to do it, but the easiest, and it is bullet-proof.
By the way: Java applications do the same.
I write software for the disabled. One of the problems is difficulty tracking the mouse pointer. I want to have the mouse cursor glow (or similar effect. Maybe water like ripples around it) when the user needs to locate it. How is this done? I know it's possible because it's used in a variety of software.
You can create custom animated cursors "on the fly" by using CreateIconFromResource and painstakingly creating the cursor data structures yourself. I recently added some tests to the Wine project for creating cursors in this way, you can take a look at the structure of the cursor data by looking at this example for a three-frame cursor:
http://source.winehq.org/source/dlls/user32/tests/cursoricon.c?v=wine-1.3.16#L222
Have a look at Realworld Cursor Editor found here.
Edit: As the OP pointed out, the OP was looking for a way of creating an animated cursor programmatically, using Win32API. AFAIK it cannot be done or is long-winded way of doing it, the 'LoadCursor' function can load the cursor from an embedded resource or a file on disk with an extension .ani, hence my answer in support for the usage of Realworld Cursor Editor which can create an .ani file containing animated cursors, the other way of doing it is to use the 'Control Panel' > 'Mouse', click on 'Pointers' tab-page on the dialog itself to set it as system-wide settings. Here is a sample of how an animated cursor gets loaded here.
Hope this helps,
Best regards,
Tom.
An alternative approach is to leave the cursor as-is, and instead add some effects around it, using, for example, a temporary topmost layered window that you draw some animation on. (eg. alpha-blended circles to get a glow effect around the cursor position.)
This has the advantage of leaving the cursor unchanged, so if it's conveying information (eg. hourglass or size handle), you're not interfering with that.
If all you need to do is make ripples appear around the cursor, there is a setting you can change in the mouse section of control panel such that ripples appear around the cursor when the CTRL key is pressed.