Animated mouse cursor in menues

[Ozymandias81]

As the title say, while I am not aware if it is possible to code it directly, would be cool to have a new MAPINFO/GAMEINFO property like "cursorpic2" sort of to indicate an animated cursor, that is defined under ANIMDEFS and which works like animated textures, taking precedence even if a CURSORPIC is defined. Name present under "cursorpic2" should match custom cursor name defined on animdefs, using a new entry called CURSOR (instead of texture/flat), maybe code shoulld look like this:

Code: Select all

cursor CURSOR1
	pic CURSOR1 tic [int value]
	pic CURSOR2 tic [int value]
	pic CURSOR3 tic [int value]
	pic CURSOR4 tic [int value]

I am aware that "the cursor display is actually handled by the system and therefore subject to certain specific limitations", as wiki says, but would be cool to be possible, or expose this somehow under zscript if that has not been done yet.

[Graf Zahl]

While Windows can do it, it requires a custom file format for this, so it'd be platforms specific.

[Cacodemon345]

It also seems only doable on Windows, X11 and Wayland; the rest doesn't support programmatically-created animated cursors AFAIK.

[Gez]

As long as the system supports the application arbitrarily changing the cursor at some point, it could be done by having a thinker that updates the cursor every frame. But that doesn't really seem worth the effort.

[Graf Zahl]

Thinkers do not run when the menu is up because normally the game is paused. This is also not really performant.

[Rachael]

You can throw the cursor handling to a dedicated thread - that might be the best way to handle it on all platforms. Plus that allows you to use a platform-neutral format.

But then the question becomes is the feature important enough that someone is willing to invest the time to do that?

[Graf Zahl]

I would never allow adding such shit to GZDoom. Let's end it here.
Hack implementations like that have a strong tendency to break rather sooner than later.