Hi,

is there a way in Kha to get the current mouse position without relying on mouse.notify(..., ..., onMove, ...)?

I want to implement custom mouse cursors but the problem is that they are lagging a bit behind. I think this is due to the fact that the mouse position changes faster than the drawing rate (or this might have to do with swapping the frontbuffer and the backbuffer), so if there was a way to get the mouse position during drawing that would probably solve the problem (or make it less obvious at least).

I don't think this possibility exists, or does it? Is there perhaps another way around this issue?

Thank you very much

Are you comparing a custom-drawn thing to the OS mouse cursor? If so, that's completely normal. The OS cursor is drawn via a hardware sprite (at least on Windows) and that is always one frame ahead of everything else because it skips the whole framebuffer procedure.

Yes I was comparing a custom drawn cursor to the OS cursor.

That's very unfortunate. In my project, the custom cursor is not always drawn but only if the mouse hovers over certain objects, so there is a noticable difference when the cursor changes. If there is no other solution to this issue, I will just draw the custom cursor all the time (with different cursor images) and completely disable the OS cursor so that the behaviour is at least consistent.

I made a screencast of my screen with both the custom and the os cursor enabled and compared it frame by frame and it actually looks like the custom cursor is even two frames behind. It is drawn at the end of the drawing loop and draws directly to the Graphics2 object of the first given framebuffer from the notifyOnFrames() callback (actually I use Armory3D's notifyOnRender2D() callback but that is basically what it does). Do you have any idea why this could be? Maybe one frame behind is not that noticable as two frames.

Or is there any possiblity to change the hardware sprite? Kha does not support it or does it? I know almost nothing about this topic but it looks like it is possible to change the sprite, I've found some C++ libraries that claim they can do this.

Thanks again

Two frames behind is normal on Windows when not in exclusive fullscreen I think. Don't know about macOS (not sure it even uses a hardware sprite) and in Linux you of course can't be sure of anything. Can also depend on graphics driver settings and whatnot. But I can tell from experience that lacking just one frame behind is just as noticeable. Changing the hardware sprite is possible on Windows at least (just look up the API and put it in) but I don't currently plan to add it to Kha.

All right, thank you very much.

I think I will first try to use a custom cursor for everything, maybe that works without being too noticable. If that doesn't help, yes, looking up the Windows API might be a solution but currently I have not enough knowledge to use it from Haxe (probably needs native code for every supported target?) and how to write good C++ code. And then there is still the question how it behaves on maxOS and Linux.

Sad to hear that this will not be implemented in Kha but I totally understand that this is not on your priority list.

Edit: Oh, and there is no way to read the current mouse position without relying on the event listener so that the drawing code itself uses the most-current position at the end of the frame?

Yes, would need some C/C++ for Windows / macOS (if that even uses hardware sprites) / Linux (maybe even multiple implementations for that, never had a closer look at the mouse cursor situation on Linux).
Re Edit: Reading mouse positions "directly" wouldn't make things any more direct, at least on Windows because Windows itself provides mouse positions via events (which then directly call the Kha events).

Ok, thank very much!