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.

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Using the Simple DirectMedia Layer with MacOS 7,8,9 on PPC
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These instructions are for people using the Apple MPW environment:
http://developer.apple.com/tools/mpw-tools/

CodeWarrior projects are available in the CWprojects directory.

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I.  Building the Simple DirectMedia Layer libraries:
    (This step isn't necessary if you have the SDL binary distribution)

  First, unpack the MPWmake.sea.hqx archive and move SDL.make into the
  SDL directory.

  Start MPW

  Set the current directory within MPW to the SDL toplevel directory.

  Build "SDL"  (Type Command-B and enter "SDL" in the dialog)

  If everything compiles successfully, you now have the PPC libraries
  "SDL" and "SDLmain.o" in the 'lib' subdirectory.

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II. Building the Simple DirectMedia Layer test programs:

  First, unpack the MPWmake.sea.hqx archive, move the new rsrc directory to
  the main SDL directory, and move the makefiles in the new test subdirectory
  to the SDL 'test' subdirectory.

  Start MPW

  Set the current directory within MPW to the SDL 'test' subdirectory.

  Build the programs that have an associated MPW makefile (file ending
  with .make), including "testwin", "testalpha", and "graywin".

  Copy the SDL library file into the test directory, and run!

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III. Building the Simple DirectMedia Layer demo programs:

  Copy one of the test program Makefiles to the demo directory
  and modify it to match the sources in the demo.

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IV.  Enjoy! :)

  If you have a project you'd like me to know about, or want to ask questions,
  go ahead and join the SDL developer's mailing list by sending e-mail to:

	sdl-request@libsdl.org

  and put "subscribe" into the subject of the message. Or alternatively you
  can use the web interface:

	http://www.libsdl.org/mailman/listinfo/sdl
  
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