Using the mouse speed

General Discussion Other

ekapalka

in General Discussion • Other • 3 months ago

Hello! I'm trying to make a 'joystick' using the mouse. I'm trying to get the mouse speed and map it to -1 to +1 for the 'x' and 'y' axis. I'm fairly certain that I can get the absolute mouse speed using

float speed = abs(mouseX-pmouseX) + abs(mouseY-pmouseY);

but I can't use that to tell the direction, and I don't know the values I'm using to map. In addition to figuring out the speed, I'm probably going to need to use the Robot library to keep the mouse on screen, which would mean that mouseX and pmouseX etc won't work... I'm sure I could figure it out if Processing was working for me, but part of it seems to be broken. The libraries are not communicating...I'm re-downloading, but I won't be here when it finishes (and it's DLing at 5kb/s). If anyone happens to have some time and/or knows how to do this, I would really appreciate if you could share some of your knowledge. Thanks!

Replies(4)

amnon.owed

Re: Using the mouse speed

3 months ago

With PVector you can do this pretty easily. To map to one you can just use normalize().

Code Example (Processing 2.0.1)

void setup() {
size(500, 500);
textAlign(LEFT, TOP);
textSize(30);
strokeWeight(3);
}
void draw() {
PVector dir = PVector.sub(mx(), pmx());
float magnitude = dir.mag();
background(255);
fill(0);
String info = "Degrees: " + int(degrees(dir.heading())) + "\nMagnitude: " + int(magnitude);
text(info, 5, 5);
translate(width/2, height/2);
line(0, 0, dir.x, dir.y);
}
PVector mx() {
return new PVector(mouseX, mouseY);
}
PVector pmx() {
return new PVector(pmouseX, pmouseY);
}

mbraendle

Re: Using the mouse speed

3 months ago

If you take the joystick example as basis, then your reasoning is wrong.

With your formula, you would always have to move your mouse to retain speed and direction.

However, a joystick is moved once to a position to determine speed and direction and then you keep it at this position to retain them.

So speed is just the distance of your mouse position to the center point (center_x, center_y) of your "joystick", direction is the angle determined by the ratio (mouseY - center_y)/(mouseX_center_x).

dist() and atan() will be your friends.

If your joystick goes beyond a certain radius on the circle it can reach, you can limit the distance to this radius.

Then you can use the distance to map it to a 0...1 speed.

ekapalka

Re: Using the mouse speed

2 months ago

:) The whole of the project involves testing both literal joystick style and a FPS style, probably toggle-able. One of the (small) issues with literal joystick style was resetting the values when stopped. It seemed really un-natural to simply decrement the x and y values, so the last thing I was working on (before Processing just gave up on me) was simply resetting the x and y values when the mouse had been stopped for a while. Thanks for the help so far (everyone)!

PhiLho

Re: Using the mouse speed

2 months ago

There was a recent (less than 2 months) topic about using Robot to keep the mouse on the window for a FPS game. If you can find it back, it will probably be useful for your project.

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