Take a trip far back in time when dinosaurs ruled the earth and Directx 5 was the very latest cutting edge thing. Back then, the hip cool and trendy thing to do with mouse input was to use direct input. I have a pile of programming books on how to do it, and you can enjoy the handy tutorials on capturing mouse input using directinput in the directx9 (and later) SDKs.
But…
It turns out that this is not the way to do it. In fact, there are even articles online now where Microsoft quietly admits that if all you want to do is normal mouse input, you should avoid directinput altogether. To make things worse, there are a ton of features to do with mouse acceleration, button swapping, double click speeds blah blah, that are all missing and need to be implemented from scratch (as I was doing….mostly) if you use directinput for the mouse. How come I missed the memo on this?
Like a trusty old coder, I’ve been re-using my engine for a while, and although I have a nice shiny new graphics engine I was still using directinput for the mouse, which explains the somewhat erratic and crap mouse support in GSB. But that changed today, when I finally got sick of it, and ripped it out. The next patch will switch GSB to the standard windows cursor, even in fullscreen, and it will all work much better.
One day I’ll find time to sort out the keyboard too…