Development < Game Development < Gamedev:MouseCursors

Mouse Cursors

Location

Cursors for Spring are stored in the Anims/ directory.

Supported Image Formats

The cursors have to be in either:

png
tga
bmp

To make transparent sections in bmp's use RGB(84, 84, 252).
The images don't have to be squared neither power-of-two, but those are preferred and the size should be <=128.

Filename

Even if your cursor isn't animated, it must have the _0 at the end of its name. Only when using a .txt this isn't needed.

Animated Cursors

Via Filenames

To make animated cursors, just make a sequence where the filenames start with '_0' at the end of the first in the sequence, going on sequentially until the last frame. This uses the default `frame time` (= the time each sprite is visible) of 0.1sec.

Via .txt

You can also create a .txt file with further specifications for your cursor:

cursorattack.txt:

hotspot %hotspot
frame %filename_0 %timespan_0
frame %filename_1 %timespan_1
frame %filename_2 %timespan_2
...

The hotspot tag is optional and can be either topleft or center.
Note, the filenames have to contain the full path, e.g. Anims/CursorMove.png.

Engine Cursors

Spring itself just needs one cursor and that's cursornormal, if this isn't present in your game Spring will crash with an ContentError.

Still there are additional cursors the engine will use when present:
(When cursors are double named in the table, it means that the following ones are fallbacks.)

Cursor Name	Internal Name/Usage	Def. Hot Spot
cursornormal		TopLeft
cursorareaattack	Area attack	Center
cursorattack	Area attack	Center
cursorattack	Attack	Center
cursorattackbad	AttackBad	Center
cursorattack	AttackBad	Center
cursorbuildbad	BuildBad	Center
cursorbuildgood	BuildGood	Center
cursorcapture	Capture	Center
cursorcentroid	Centroid	Center
cursordwatch	DeathWait	Center
cursorwait	DeathWait	Center
cursordgun	DGun	Center
cursorattack	DGun	Center
cursorfight	Fight	Center
cursorattack	Fight	Center
cursorgather	GatherWait	Center
cursorwait	GatherWait	Center
cursordefend	Guard	Center
cursorpickup	Load units	Center
cursormove	Move	Center
cursorpatrol	Patrol	Center
cursorreclamate	Reclaim	Center
cursorrepair	Repair	Center
cursorrevive	Resurrect	Center
cursorrepair	Resurrect	Center
cursorrestore	Restore	Center
cursorrepair	Restore	Center
cursorselfd	SelfD	Center
cursornumber	SquadWait	Center
cursorwait	SquadWait	Center
cursortime	TimeWait	Center
cursorwait	TimeWait	Center
cursorunload	Unload units	Center
cursorwait	Wait	Center

Example: A cursorattack_0.bmp (same for cursorattack.txt) in your Anims/ dir will automatically used for attack commands.

Lua/Custom Cursors

Runtime Replacing Default Cursors

To runtime change cursors (e.g. per-faction cursors or user-configurable ones) you may want to use Spring.ReplaceMouseCursor. Example:

Spring.ReplaceMouseCursor("cursorattack", "faction2_subdir/cursorattack")
Spring.ReplaceMouseCursor("cursormove", "faction2_subdir/cursormove")
...

Give Custom Commands a Cursor

First you need to register your custom cursor with Spring.AssignMouseCursor. After that you can use it in Spring.EditUnitCmdDesc/Spring.InsertUnitCmdDesc:

--loads cursor from foo_cursor.txt, foo_cursor_0.bmp, ...
Spring.AssignMouseCursor("mahcursor", "foo_cursor", false)

--NOTE: this is SYNCED code!
--add custom cmddesc
Spring.InsertUnitCmdDesc(unitID, {
  ...
  cursor = "mahcursor",
  ...
})