Capturing mouse and keyboard input using dotNet

Coding
1

I’ve recently starting looking into this, but thought I’d ask here to see if anyone has already found a way to do this.

Max provides some methods to do this already, but the way it tests for a right-click of the mouse is completely unreliable. So I’d thought I’d turn to dotNet for an alternative way of testing the mouse. Also, Max doesn’t have a way of testing just any keyboard input, only the shift/alt/control keys.

Any help would be appreciated, and I’ll post any information/solutions I find also.

2

I recently ran into this limitation as well - only being about to use ctrl, alt, or shift as inputs in my mini app. I’d love to hear about making this work.

3

I know you can do this using XNA and WPF, but don’t know how to get those libraries recognized by Max. I know you can hack WPF into Max, but don’t want to go there right now.

4

[QUOTE=bcloward;793]I recently ran into this limitation as well - only being about to use ctrl, alt, or shift as inputs in my mini app. I’d love to hear about making this work.[/QUOTE]

Light looked into this at my behest:
http://tech-artists.org/forum/showpost.php?p=690&postcount=5

It doesn’t appear possible to do what you want, JHaywood. If the mouse/key press is inside a dotnet control, doing this is pretty easy. Basically:

on theControl KeyDown arg do
(
	local keyCode = arg.keyCode
	local virtKeys = DotNetClass "System.Windows.Forms.Keys"

	if (keyCode == virtKeys.T) then print "T pressed"
)

You probably knew that already but I figured it can’t hurt posting.

But if you just want to test all the time/outside of a control, or want it for controls without the MouseDown/KeyDown event handler, I think you’re out of luck.

5

I’ve been thinking that this thread over at cgtalk along with the good old windows message pump might have a few clues as to how we can deal with this, but haven’t had any chances to do any real experimenting as yet.

On looking again, thats completely useless :slight_smile: It only helps with SENDKING keypresses not with intercepting them. :wink:

6

There are a couple more threads that might help:
DotNET+DirectInput(Joystick) Help needed!
Timeslider controlled with the Mouse wheel

Using DirectInput looks promising.

And then there’s some info I got from one or our engineers on GetKeyboardState/GetKeyState/GetAsyncKeyState, GetMouseMovePointsEx, and using PInvoke to access them.

I want to dive into this more when I get some free time. For now, I’ve created a function I can call for getting user input. It just uses the built in Max methods currrently, but I want to change those out for dotNet methods eventually.

fn getUserInput =
(
	local userInput, ui
	
	struct userInput
	(
		escape,
		shift,
		control,
		alt,
		mLeft,
		mMiddle,
		mRight
	)
	
	mb = mouse.buttonStates
	
	ui = userInput()
	ui.escape = keyboard.escPressed
	ui.shift = keyboard.shiftPressed
	ui.control = keyboard.controlPressed
	ui.alt = keyboard.altPressed
	ui.mLeft = mb[1]
	ui.mMiddle = mb[2]
	ui.mRight = mb[3]
	
	ui
)