The following is a breakdown of the available properties used when setting up mouse interaction, as well as a sample of the available cursors. Be aware that cursors shown will change based on your operating system.
Mouse Interface Properties
Within the PlayerController class, you will find a category of properties titled Mouse Interface. This is where all setup for cursor-based mouse interaction takes place. The properties are as follows:
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| Show Mouse Cursor | This determines whether or not the mouse cursor will be visible. Note that this is pulling directly from the operating system's cursor by default. |
| Enable Click Events | This activates the ability for click events to be processed. Without this, you cannot click on things. |
| Enable Mouse Over Events | This activates the ability for mouse-over events to be processed. Without this, mouse-overs do not work. |
| Default Mouse Cursor | This sets what the mouse cursor will look like by default. The options are shown in the Available Cursors section. |
| Default Click Trace Channel | This sets the default channel that will be used by the trace system to see what you have clicked on. The default setting is Visibiltiy. This means the trace is checking visibility status of the object and will only return true if the object is found to be visible. Put another way, you can only interact with objects you can see in the game. |
Available Cursors
The following list contains all of the available cursors, along when you will generally see them in the Windows operating system. However, you should not feel restricted by their common uses. You may utilize any of these however you wish in your games. Just be aware that many computer users will be used to seeing these cursors under very specific circumstances, and that stepping outside of that convention may lead to confusion.
At this time, cursors are pulled directly from the operating system. The following cursors were captured from Windows using the Aero theme. On other operating systems or themes, expect these to look different.
| Setting | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| None | This effectively hides the cursor. Care must be used, however, since the cursor location is still being calculated, so you will still get mouse over and click events. | N/A |
| Default | This is the default arrow cursor. |  |
| Text Edit Beam | This is the cursor that generally appears when there is a text field that can be edited. |  |
| Resize Left Right | This cursor appears on the edge of any window or UI asset that can be resized horizontally. |  |
| Resize Up Down | This cursor appears on the edge of any window or UI asset that can be resized vertically. |  |
| Resize South East | This cursor appears on the edge of any window or UI asset that can be resized horizontally and vertically from the upper or lower right corner. |  |
| Resize South West | This cursor appears on the edge of any window or UI asset that can be resized horizontally and vertically from the upper or lower left corner. |  |
| Cardinal Cross | This cursor is often seen when moving windows around on the screen. |  |
| Crosshairs | This cursor appears when performing various precision actions. |  |
| Hand | This cursor typically appears when hovering over a hyperlink. |  |
| Grab Hand | The grab hand appears when hovering over objects intended to be dragged about the screen. |  |
| Grab Hand Closed | This cursor is generally shown while dragging objects about the screen. |  |
| Slashed Circle | This cursor is often shown when trying to perform invalid operations, such as dragging an item into a place it cannot go. |  |
| Eye Dropper | This cursor is most often used when sampling color at a given pixel location. |  |