Introducing mouse delay (local machine)

[Kannan Ramanathan]

I am trying to make Windows render the mouse cursor with a user-defined delay (in milliseconds). For ex., if the user-defined delay is 100ms, the mouse should be rendered 100ms after the user moved the mouse (If you are wondering what is the use-case for this, I am doing this as a part of UI/Usability study that we are doing internally). As a system sw guy, my initial inclination was "lets put something next to mouclass drv", but wanted to check out the user mode first (since the code most prob will be picked up by another app-only developer). I tried the low-level hooks from an article here in CP...it worked fine for tracking the mouse, but I didn't know how to introduce the delay... Any ideas? TIA.

[_Superman_]

The system sends the WM_SETCURSOR message to a window if the mouse is moved. You could probably hook this message using SetWindowsHookEx(WH_CALLWNDPROC, ... and introduce the delay there.

«_Superman_» I love work. It gives me something to do between weekends.

[Code o mat]

How about this approach: -you run a thread which contains a queue of delayed mouse messages, the queue could contain a timestamp for each message and the thread would check the first message's timestamp and if if the time has come, it would inject it back to the system and remove it from its own queue. -In your mouse hook you would need a way to be able to determine if the incoming message is a delayed one or not, if it is, pass it on, if it is not a delayed message then do not pass it on but put it in the other thread's queue with the right timestamp (for example: now + delay). It's just an idea, i haven't tried this nor have an idea how it would perform.

> The problem with computers is that they do what you tell them to do and not what you want them to do. < > Life: great graphics, but the gameplay sux. <

modified on Tuesday, June 9, 2009 6:22 AM