Hi all,
I'm using Dev-C++ and coding in C.

Like everyone else, I've got mouse icon flickering issues when i'm blitting my backbuffer to the screen every 50 ms. Its a simple game, so I don't really want to have a triple buffer going on here. I suppose DRS might work but that means I gotta blit every ms, which I'm trying to avoid now (trying to inhibit blitting backbuffer to screen every 50ms or so only). I'm working in a windowed mode game, and hardware mouse is enabled. The best I could get that removed flickering was this code:

scare_mouse();
show_mouse(buffer);
blit(buffer, screen, 0, 0, 0, 0, buffer->w, buffer->h);
show_mouse(screen);
unscare_mouse();

It works, but since I'm only blitting every 50ms, i'm getting shadows left behind from the recent blitting.

Any thoughts on this? Or does everyone just go the distance and let the computer blit buffers to the screen like crazy?

thanks
=Han=

scare_mouse();
show_mouse(buffer);
blit(buffer, screen, 0, 0, 0, 0, buffer->w, buffer->h);
show_mouse(screen);
unscare_mouse();

Hm, why would you call show_mouse on your buffer, and then again on the screen? thats going to come out very weird. Take Williams advice. And btw, using the hardware mouse means the OS handles the mouse drawing, not you.

Take out the line show_mouse(screen);

Just use your own mouse bitmap.
assuming BITMAP *mouspr is the picture of your pointer
blit it as:

blit( mouspr , buffer , 0 , 0 , mouse_x , mouse_y , mouspr -> w , mouspr -> h );

You could add some X and Y to center the mouspr on the mouse coordinate.

Yeah. But the blit avoir flickering. All flickering. If there is still, it's vsync & | refresh rate faults. GfxDriver parameters can be culprites too.
And a simple call to a simple blit is one line less than too show_mouse call ;-)
(for the last i'm joking you know ;-p )

Well the reason I typed that convulted code (I chucked the double show_mouse in there coz a single wasnt helping).

Like i said earlier on, with my original show_mouse(screen) and only a

scare_mouse();
blit(buffer, screen, ...);
unscare_mouse();

to do any blitting, since I'm doing this every 50ms (interrupt timer), it seems to cause my mouse to flicker. Anyway at the moment I'm just doing a show_mouse(buffer) and doing a

while (something) {
show_mouse(NULL);
// game loop code in here
show_mouse(buffer);
blit(buffer, screen, ....);
}

Which means I'm just gonna do a massive amount of buffer->screen blitting in my game. Is that what people normally do to avoid flickering mouse icons?

Btw, I read in another post that show_mouse(NULL) disingages the hardware mousedrawing. Is that true?

And I don't intend to write my own code to check mouse_x and y to handle my own mouse icon because the API is there, and its messy to clear my screen or backbuffer to reblit the icon and the image behind it.

I tried this with a 15x15 cursor and it wasn't visible. So i used what i'm using in my game: 75x75 cursor. And sure enough, flickering icon.

Ah... nowonder. So without hardware cursoring, I'm stuck with a flickering icon unless I do something else. Thanks! I've worked around it by show_mouse(buffer) and blitting buffer to screen every game loop. Not very resource-friendly I guess, but it works.

=Han=

Why shouldn't I use show_mouse(buffer)? What is the badness of doing it on a memory bitmap? Sorry I think I read it somewhere but forgot where, and its not in the manual.

I guess the reason I don't want to draw my mouse on my buffer is that it will draw over something on my buffer that I don't want overwritten or it will take some re-coding to figure out how to redraw the thing behind it. maybe dirty rectangles. But I thought this show_mouse(buffer) thing seemed to solve all my problems. Thats why I would like to know what so bad about it.

Thanks
=Han=

Ooo.. ok. That makes perfect sense. I'll keep that in mind and do a dirty rectangle then. Peace out.