Would it be possible to use the mousepad area on a laptop as a drawing canvas for games? Like say you wanted to play a game with a ball bouncing around a level and you wanted to draw a line in the level for the ball to bounce off as well, but using your mousepad; would that be possible?

Just wondering....if so any ideas how this would work? Also if possible, any good game ideas that could come from it?

I suppose you after a 3d project. Use particle-sprites as colliders-line and create them in places where the user wants them to place using mousepad coordinates. The project would work in a Top camera view.

the mousepad is used as a "normal" mouse, so it shouldnt be a problem...
just try to save the mouse-coods in an array and show it wiht the draw_line function

I'd recommend using a top-view of course, and then snapping objects to an invisible grid for collision.

You could even store the objects in a 3d array, and then check to see what positions are empty for changing the objects shape.

for example, if the position above, and diagonally to the bottom-left were taken, then you could morph your piece to fit. If you keep your pieces invisible, then you could have the user draw lines in 3D using particles or draw_line() functions...

You guys are completely missing it...

A touchpad is normally a relative movement method. I.E. Press anywhere and drag in a direction and the mouse moves from its current position in that direction a certain distance. This is exactly how a normal mouse works, except with reversed traction .

What ISG is looking for is using the touchpad as if it were a tablet (unless I am mistaken) so that when you press in the top left corner, it moves the mouse instantly to the top left corner of the screen. This way, depression on the pad is comparable to touching a brush to the canvas and drawing, letting up stops. With the normal functionality, the depression and drag is for moving, and the click for painting. It makes it one less step of interaction and more intuitive.

As far as I know, it's possible, but I'm not sure exactly how. You probably need to create a DLL (or use Lite-C) to access windows API calls to interact at a lower level with the device and determine if there is any depression, and if so, where that depression is located on the pad.

-Rhuarc

Yep, lower level dll is required. However, the calls are probably device-dependent...

Rhuarc has what I mean down exactly. I was figuring a DLL would be required for such a task to be made possible, just wondering how exactly it could be put about to make it work.

Any ideas or attempts to make possible would be nice to see/hear!

Hello, this should be possible to realize, but I don't know how. There is a tool included with the drivers for my mousepad which shows grafically how you moved the mouse and where you pressed on the mousepad.

I found the program too and I see how it works. Any ideas on how to get a DLL or the same idea to work in realtime?

Thanks a lot Iron_Chancellor!!

Anyone willing to work on a DLL?