I was feverishly looking for a method by which to restrict a user's mouse to a single display in a multi-display setup on a Mac.
I came across this question: Cocoa: Limit the mouse for the screen , I promise I did not duplicate this question.
The question, however, caused me to think that you could write a simple application using Cocoa to limit the mouse to one screen, run this application in the background and still use my game, which was developed in AS3 / Adobe AIR / Flash.
The game is a full-screen game and will always have the same resolution on a single monitor. Another monitor will also always have the same resolution, but should just be a non-interactive display of information. I need a user to be able to interact with the game, but it’s no coincidence that the mouse is removed from the game screen.
Summary of the question: Can I create a basic application for Mac OS X (Lion) using Cocoa / Objective-C, which will limit the mouse to one monitor, which can be run in the STORY and does not allow users to move the mouse outside the monitor, which will have a full-screen game running on it?
[EDIT:] I found the basic code needed to run the loop for the Quartz event filter, kindly provided by this answer: Change NSEvent to send a different key than the one that was pressed
I am going to use this code for testing purposes, and I modified it a bit to detect mouse events as follows:
CGEventRef mouse_filter(CGEventTapProxy proxy, CGEventType type, CGEventRef event, void *refcon) { NSPoint point = CGEventGetLocation(event); NSPoint target = NSMakePoint(100,100); if (point.x >= 500){ CGEventSetLocation(event,target); } return event; } int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init]; CFRunLoopSourceRef runLoopSource; CFMachPortRef eventTap = CGEventTapCreate(kCGHIDEventTap, kCGHeadInsertEventTap, kCGEventTapOptionDefault, kCGEventMouseMoved, mouse_filter, NULL); if (!eventTap) { NSLog(@"Couldn't create event tap!"); exit(1); } runLoopSource = CFMachPortCreateRunLoopSource(kCFAllocatorDefault, eventTap, 0); CFRunLoopAddSource(CFRunLoopGetCurrent(), runLoopSource, kCFRunLoopCommonModes); CGEventTapEnable(eventTap, true); CFRunLoopRun(); CFRelease(eventTap); CFRelease(runLoopSource); [pool release]; exit(0); }
This, however, does not seem to work perfectly right. This, of course, correctly detects mouse events, and it correctly moves events. For example, if I dragged a window 500 pixels to the left of the screen, the event of dragging the window will be moved to 100 100. However, the mouse itself does not move to a new location when it simply moves around the screen without performing any other actions. IE: You can still move the mouse around the screen, not just on a column with 500 pixels.
Any ideas?