How do I get input data more often than one per frame?

Hi,

You probably hitting a change I did recently. The problem we were trying to work around is if you plug in a 8khz mouse then at 30 fps it will be 266 mouse events per second. This was too much for the current code and it was taking more time .. which meant fps was dropping .. which meant more events were coming in .. which meant it was taking even more time .. until fps drops to 1-2 .. which is not good indeed.

And in most applications one usually does something among the lines:

Code (CSharp):

1. public class MyScript : MonoBehaviour
2. {
3.     void Update()
4.     {
5.         SomeValue += Mouse.current.delta;
6.     }
7. }
8.  

So the values of delta between the frames are completely unused here. There is some case in shooter games where you want delta value when something happened, like if mouse button was pressed, but even then it doesn't mean you want all of them.

Only applications that would need all deltas are drawing applications, but specifics of them is that they are usually not realtime, you start drawing and brush engine buffers all deltas into a queue and applies them in its own time. Meaning you need to release your stylus every-once-in-a-while so brush engine can catchup with the processing. To see that try drawing with a brush in Krita/Photoshop without releasing stylus, after 20-30 sec you will see it just gets overwhelmed a bit and lag between input and drawing increases.

Also note that mouse position and mouse deltas are decoupled, mouse deltas are driven by low-level RAWINPUT API, while mouse position is higher level windows cursor API. We can't know exact mouse position for every mouse delta change as Windows is coalescing moves so position changes less often.

If there is some other case that we haven't cought, we have an option to disable all of this:

InputSettings.disableRedundantEventsMerging = true;

this will propagate all data as-is, though with risks of eventual frame stalls.

Please let me know what is your use case so we can architect next version better.
Thanks!

 

@kmedved Привіт!

So on which platform you're trying to do this? I believe on Windows you should be able to get all mouse move events, but I'll need to check for other platforms.

 

@kmedved I've checked macOS source code, so we report every NSEvent with type NSEventTypeMouseMoved, NSEventTypeLeftMouseDragged, NSEventTypeRightMouseDragged, NSEventTypeOtherMouseDragged as mouse update.

Are you sure macOS reports mouse data moves more often than you observed?
Maybe we're using the wrong API here, not sure, maybe GCMouseInput is the way to go.