Mouse pointer invisible on game menu

[rpb]

Hi,

I'm running Windows Vista Business SP2 with Osmos. When I start the game the mouse pointer is invisible on game menus. Confused me a lot to start off with. I can select things by guessing where the pointer should be and moving very slowly and carefully but nothing shows up on screen. In-game, the pointer works fine but selecting a level is really tricky.

I did a quick search and apparently there was a bug reported about this on a WINE mailing list, but that shouldn't affect me, should it, as I'm not on Linux?

Thanks for anyone's help in advance!

[Meal Worms]

Hi rpb,

The PC version of Osmos uses a custom cursor resource for the menu cursor. I'm afraid I'm not sure what to suggest. The cursor is embedded in the executable itself, so it's not that the cursor file is missing from your install, for example. Could it have anything to do with e.g. the Windows user account you're using to run the game not allowing an application to change the cursor for some weird security reason?

Dave

[rpb]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for your quick reply.

I have a non-admin level user account, but had to enter an admin-level password in the installer so had assumed that would grant it rights to do what it wanted. I also installed it into a non-default location (e:\program files rather than c:\program files, because that's where my other games are and my c: drive has less free space) - not sure if this is relevant.

I'll try re-installing it whilst logged on as administrator and let you know if that helps...

---

One final weirdness I just noticed, which might point to something, or might be irrelevant: I thought I'd take a screenshot to show a level highlighted with no mouse cursor showing, but using IrfanView to capture the image gave me what looks like a black screen with a little triangular cursor on it - I'm guessing your custom cursor you mentioned. It's almost as if it's drawing the cursor on a different surface/context than the one the rest of the screen is drawing on. But this also shows that the resource has been loaded (assuming this is your custom cursor resource):

[Meal Worms]

Hi rpb,

Yep, that's the Osmos cursor. Weird situation. It's a long shot, but can you make sure your drivers are all up-to-date? Something else you may want to try is running the game using D3D instead of OpenGL -- see this Osmos FAQ topic for details.

Dave

[rpb]

Something else you may want to try is running the game using D3D instead of OpenGL -- see this Osmos FAQ topic for details.

Hi Dave,

OK, I tried using Direct3D as you said. I still had no cursor, although if I moved the mouse quickly it looked like it was flickering in the background somehow, which it didn't do with OpenGL. Also when I closed the game a dark rectangle was briefly displayed as if it had been behind the game all along, and it had trails that I'm guessing were where I'd been moving the mouse on the menu. It disappeared a split second after it became visible.

So I logged on as Administrator instead and reinstalled the game (without uninstalling first), and then ran the game and the cursor appeared!

So I logged back on as me ("Standard User" level) and the cursor was gone again! So I'm guessing there's something it's doing at runtime that isn't allowed when not running as admin... 8-S

Although I just did another test, and if I run Osmos from the start menu but right click and choose "Run as Administrator" then I still don't get a cursor!

And now I just noticed something else! If I Alt+Tab while Osmos is running, the task bar draws over the top of the Osmos window, and the Osmos cursor reappears! But if I click back on Osmos to bring it to the front it disappears again! So it definitely seems like that cursor has attached itself to the wrong window, or the drawing plane, or something like that!