MonoGame Mouse.GetState() not getting position

Input
1

Hi All,

I am relatively new to MonoGame but I player around with XNA quite a lot back in the day.

I am trying to port an old project of mine. This project was a 2D game engine (nowhere near complete) that included a windows forms based tile map editor.

The issue that I am currently having is when using Monogame Game class embedded within a windows form.

In order to achieve this, I am setting the draw surface to a PictureBox as follows:

void graphics_PreparingDeviceSettings(object sender,
PreparingDeviceSettingsEventArgs e)
{

e.GraphicsDeviceInformation.PresentationParameters.DeviceWindowHandle = drawSurface;

}

where drawSurface is a PictureBox’s IntPtr handle.

The issue comes in when I am trying to get the MouseState in the Update loop.

MouseState ms = Mouse.GetState();

I have also tried MouseState ms = Mouse.GetState(this.Window);

I am unsure why but ms.X and ms.Y are never updated.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

P.S. This project was created using the Windows monogame project type.

2

This is an interesting one.

Thinking about it what is probably happening is the windows form is consuming all mouse events so Monogame never sees them.

I would have a look at MonoGame.Forms - Create your Editor Environment! and see if you can use that first.

If not I think you may have to find a way of sending mouse events from the main form to Monogame.

WinFormsGameForm does have a windows message pump so it should be possible.

1 Like
3

It seems you are creating a windows project. Try connecting the control handle like this:

Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input.Mouse.WindowHandle = Handle;

Further if you need keyboard input (Keyboard.GetState()) you could use this nice little trick:

private void SetKeyboardInput(bool enable)
{
    var keyboardType = typeof(Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input.Keyboard);
    var methodInfo = keyboardType.GetMethod("SetActive", System.Reflection.BindingFlags.NonPublic |     System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Static);
    methodInfo.Invoke(null, new object[] { enable });
}

And use it like this:

SetKeyboardInput(true);

This is how we are doing it in the MonoGame.Forms library.

Hope this helps.

4

Hi StainlessTobii,

Thank you very much for the reply. I will take a look at the article that you provided as soon as I have the free time available again.

I did manage to find a way to work around the problem and I will post them below in case anyone has the same problem and would like a “quick fix”.

Thanks again!

5

Hi sqrMin1,

Thank you very much for the reply. I will give this a try as soon as I have the time again.

I did already try setting the WindowHandle, to no avail however. I am unsure if there is perhaps something I did incorrectly there.

I will be posting my temporary fix below, in case anyone runs into a similar problem and I will be trying all solutions that are posted.

Thanks a lot for the response.

6

Hi All,

The work around that I mentioned in my above replies is as follows:

Create an InputManager class of your own, with properties such as IsMouseLeftClicked, IsMouseRightClicked, etc.

In your Game class, create a public variable to store an instance of this class and instantiate it within the constructor.

Once you have done this, bind mouse events to your render canvas (in my case, a picture box) and allow these to update the Game’s InputManager class via set methods.

In the Game’s Update(), check these properties instead of Mouse.GetState().

I hope this helps somebody with the same issue as me, sorry that the explanation is vague but I am working from memory. Please let me know if you would like a code sample.

Thanks a lot to all who replied again, I will still try the suggested methods as soon as I have a chance and post the results here.