Hardware cursor and buffered input

[psiegel]

Does anyone know if ogre supports use of a hardware cursor with buffered input, and if so how to set it up? I find after creating and initializing the EvenProcessor object, the window takes control of the mouse and removes the cursor icon. Now, I could obviously create a software rendered cursor by getting the CursorGuiElement and setting its material which is ok in fullscreen mode, but in windowed mode the cursor is trapped by the window and cannot be used to perform any operations on the window (move, close, minimize, etc.)

Paul

[psiegel]

If you'll excuse my bumping myself, I find it very surprising that nobody uses Ogre in a window and wants to track mouse input. Somebody must be doing it. Please help me!

Paul

[pjcast]

You have to modify the input system Ogre uses, and change the cooperation level of DirectX.

The input system is designed to do what is needed the majority of the time... And that is keep input. For any special needs, and most games qualify, you will need to modify it to suit your needs.

There is also a post floating around about using the windows message pump to do input. I suggest you search the forums for all the various discussions on input.

[qsilver]

Yes, you will need to write your own InputManager code and cursor support functions. Or skip InputManager entirely, use your own input framework (ATL / MFC / whatever) and provide a window handle that Ogre can use for rendering.

If you hack up the InputManager code, these may be useful:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/defau ... Cursor.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/defau ... erties.asp

[nfz]

I'll be another one to recommend that you should build your own input manager. Have a look at this thread for some inspiration: http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=7457.

[psiegel]

Well, thanks for the pointers everyone. I found it surprising that hardware cursors were not supported out of the box, but I suppose it's fairly common for game-oriented engines to skip out on real support for windowed mode. I took a look at the Win32Input and Win32Input8 classes, and it looks like it wouldn't be difficult to hack some changes in for hardware cursors for now. (Just a matter of using DISCL_NONEXCLUSIVE for the cooperative level on the mouse device and commenting out the ShowCursor(FALSE) call).

Maybe in the long run it's best to write my own input manager, but I do worry about stuff like picking, which I haven't quite looked into yet but assume I will need down the road.

Thanks for the response guys.

Paul

[sinbad]

If you're doing a windowed mode application you might want to just plug the Ogre rendering into an existing window instead anyway (see the setExternalWindowHandle method). We're not an input library, we just do graphics - the input code that is there is just for convenience, there were far too many platform-specific ways to do other forms of input for us to support out of the box.