Fixed bug #611 From Tim Angus 2008-08-12 11:18:06 I'm one of the maintainers of ioquake3.org, an updated version of the Quake 3 engine. Relatively recently, we moved ioq3 to use SDL as a replacement for 95% of the platform specific code that was there. On the whole it's doing a great job but unfortunately since the move we've been getting complaints about the quality of the mouse input on the Windows platform to the point where for many the game is unplayable. Put in other terms, the current stable SDL 1.2 is basically not fit for purpose if you need high quality mouse input as you do in a first person shooter. Over the weekend I decided to pull my finger out and actually figure out what's going on. There are basically two major problems. Firstly, when using the "windib" driver, mouse input is gathered via the WM_MOUSEMOVE message. Googling for this indicates that often this is known to result in "spurious" and/or "missing" mouse movement events; this is the primary cause of the poor mouse input. The second problem is that the "directx" driver does not work at all in combination with OpenGL meaning that you can't use DirectInput if your application also uses OpenGL. In other words you're locked into using the "windib" driver and its poor mouse input. In order to address these problems I've done the following: * Remove WM_MOUSEMOVE based motion event generation and replace with calls to GetCursorPos which seems much more reliable. In order to achieve this I've moved mouse motion out into a separate function that is called once per DIB_PumpEvents. * Remove the restriction on the "directx" driver being inoperable in combination with OpenGL. There is a bug for this issues that I've hijacked to a certain extent (http://bugzilla.libsdl.org/show_bug.cgi?id=265). I'm the first to admit I don't really understand why this restriction is there in the first place. The commit message for the bug fix that introduced this restriction (r581) isn't very elaborate and I couldn't see any other bug tracking the issue. If anyone has more information on the bug that was avoided by r581 it would be helpful as I/someone could then look into addressing the problem without disabling the "directx" driver. * I've also removed the restriction on not being allowed to use DirectInput in windowed mode. I couldn't see any reason for this, at least not from our perspective. I have my suspicions that it'll be something like matching up the cursor with the mouse coordinates... * I bumped up the DirectInput API used to version 7 in order to get access to mouse buttons 4-7. I've had to inject a little bit of the DX7 headers into SDL there as the MinGW ones aren't up to date in this respect.

                         Simple DirectMedia Layer

                                  (SDL)

                                Version 1.2

---
http://www.libsdl.org/

This is the Simple DirectMedia Layer, a general API that provides low
level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL,
and 2D framebuffer across multiple platforms.

The current version supports Linux, Windows CE/95/98/ME/XP/Vista, BeOS,
MacOS Classic, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, IRIX,
and QNX.  The code contains support for Dreamcast, Atari, AIX, OSF/Tru64,
RISC OS, SymbianOS, Nintendo DS, and OS/2, but these are not officially
supported.

SDL is written in C, but works with C++ natively, and has bindings to
several other languages, including Ada, C#, Eiffel, Erlang, Euphoria,
Guile, Haskell, Java, Lisp, Lua, ML, Objective C, Pascal, Perl, PHP,
Pike, Pliant, Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk.

This library is distributed under GNU LGPL version 2, which can be
found in the file  "COPYING".  This license allows you to use SDL
freely in commercial programs as long as you link with the dynamic
library.

The best way to learn how to use SDL is to check out the header files in
the "include" subdirectory and the programs in the "test" subdirectory.
The header files and test programs are well commented and always up to date.
More documentation is available in HTML format in "docs/index.html", and
a documentation wiki is available online at:
	http://www.libsdl.org/cgi/docwiki.cgi

The test programs in the "test" subdirectory are in the public domain.

Frequently asked questions are answered online:
	http://www.libsdl.org/faq.php

If you need help with the library, or just want to discuss SDL related
issues, you can join the developers mailing list:
	http://www.libsdl.org/mailing-list.php

Enjoy!
	Sam Lantinga				(slouken@libsdl.org)