DInput

DirectInput is the part of DirectX that handles user inputs. It supports mouse, joystick and keyboard input.

Most DirectX 7 features are implemented. Some DirectX 8+ features missing (action map).

Joystick status

• Joystick support is implemented - evdev, joydev and OS X drivers

• Force feedback implemented but is very buggy and supported by evdev driver only.

Keyboard status

• Keyboard is fully implemented.

Mouse status

There is a bit more work to be done on DInput / Mouse. While all the basic APIs have been implemented (enough to please all known games), the problems are as follows:

• DXGrab support needs to be verified. The problem here is that doing a mouse grab in X11 will restrict all inputs to the X connection which did the grab. Which means that only the thread that did the grab will get events. And as there may be one thread doing the DDraw stuff, another the DInput initialization and yet another actually reading from the device, it's hard to detect from where to grab the mouse.
• in Windows, DInput only supports relative mouse movements (absolute position reporting is buggy) while X11 only supports absolute mouse position reporting. This means that Wine has to emulate relative reporting with absolute positions. This has been implemented in Wine by warping the mouse cursor back to the middle of the screen on each move. This works but has the following adverse effects:
  1. for games actually doing DInput while still showing the cursor (Settlers III is one example), this plays hell with the mouse cursor and makes the game unplayable
  2. other games use DInput to get absolute mouse reporting while still using standard Win32 functions to get the absolute mouse position (clipped to the game window).

LionelUlmer is working on a new X11 extension to help the relative mouse movement issue (basically to add an extension to X11 that would add relative movements in addition to absolute positions). While waiting for this extension, moving all the warping stuff to the X11 driver would help fix problem 2 (but not problem 1 which requires for the clean solution the X11 extension but could be fixed in an ugly way using a hack).

The other problem is then architectural: how to move the DInput code to the X11 driver? Basically, the current DInput DLL only depends on DInput (and thus can be reused by ReactOS). Moving the mouse support to the X11 driver would mean that this DLL would be 'Wine-only' (except if the X11 driver <-> DInput DLL follows the DDK which is a path that I did not check yet).

Extension status

XInput 2 which features relative mouse movements is part of x.org 7.5. During development of xinput2 TBBle has written experimental patches for Wine, see http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2009-April/074957.html. The patches need to be rewritten before they can enter Wine, see http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2009-June/076692.html for the needed changes (e.g. explorer feeding XI2 events to wineserver).

Workers: ChristianCosta, LionelUlmer, MarcusMeissner, RaphaelJunqueira, RobertReif, VitaliyMargolen