don't you know its rude to point?

So my interest for this week (I’m fickle so you can guarantee that next week I’ll be doing something else) is porting games to AROS. My focus therefore has been on two things: getting an up-to-date C++ compiler working, and hacking on the JJFFE port.

A C++ compiler is needed if I’m going to port Battle for Wesnoth, but also if I’m going to have a shot at getting a WebKit port happening (yes, I haven’t forgotten). The last C++ compiler we seem to have available is GCC 3.3.1, which is quite old now. I’m attempting a port of the latest release of GCC, which is 4.2.1. The C compiler seems to be fine; just some minor changes to the already-extant 4.0.0 patch we have. I’m having some trouble regenerating autoconf files though - seems that GCC is very finicky about its build environment, and I’m not meeting its high standards yet. I will keep at it - its a good side project because it mostly consists of make a couple of small tweaks then waiting half an hour while the build runs and fails. If I succeed, then I’ll be trying to keep the patches updated as each new version of GCC comes out (assuming I can’t convince the developers to accept the patches into mainline).

Meanwhile, JJFFE has been getting some love. So far I’ve cleaned up the existing code and properly merged Kalamatee’s window scaling code and the other changes he made, which were great work but left the source in a real mess. Things are now looking much nicer so its time for some features.

In FFE you orient the ship by moving the mouse while holding down the right mouse button. In the original version and the SDL and Win32 ports holding the right button causes the mouse pointer to disappear and be locked in place. Currently in the AROS port this doesn’t happen - right hold still moves the ship around, but the mouse pointer moves too and if you move it out of the window then all the movement stops.

I’ve been scouring docs, newsgroups and forums for an way of disabling the mouse pointer and have come up with nothing. This evening I figured out a way that I think will work. The idea is simple - when the right button is clicked, open input.device and eat up all the incoming mouse events before Intuition can get hold of them. I’ll have to process raw mouse events myself, but that shouldn’t be too hard. When the right button is released, I remove my fingers from the pie and Intuition continues as normal. A couple of calls to ClearPointer() and SetPointer() should provide the vanishing pointer. I’ll have a crack at implementing this tomorrow.

Its really nice to be writing proper code again and nutting out tricky stuff. I missed it.