Mouse Input

Mouse input works much like keyboard input - we have a MouseState struct that represents the state of the mouse, and we can get the current state from the static Mouse class’s GetState() method. You’ll also want to use the same caching strategy of a current and prior state if you want to know when a button goes down or comes up, i.e.:

    MouseState currentMouseState;
    MouseState priorMouseState;

    public override void Update(GameTime gameTime) 
    {
        priorMouseState = currentMouseState;
        currentMouseState = Mouse.GetState();

        // TODO: Add your update logic here 

        base.Update(gameTime);
    }

However, the MouseState struct has a different set of properties:

• X - the horizontal position of the mouse as an integer in relation to the window.
• Y - the vertical position of the mouse as an integer in relation to the window.
• LeftButton - a ButtonState indicating if the left button is down
• MiddleButton - a ButtonState indicating if the middle button is down
• RightButton - a ButtonState indicating if the right button is down
• ScrollWheelValue - an integer representing the cumulative scroll wheel value since the start of the game
• HorizontalScrollWheelValue - an integer representing the cumulative scroll wheel value since the start of the game
• XButton1 - a ButtonState indicating if the XButton1 button is down
• XButton2 - a ButtonState indicating if the XButton2 is down

Note that instead of booleans, buttons are represented by the ButtonState enumeration. This allows the internal representation of the MouseState buttons to be a single bitmask, making copy operations on the MouseState much faster (and the struct itself to take up less space).

Thus, to check if the LeftButton is down, we’d need to use:

if(currentMouseState.LeftButton == ButtonState.Pressed) 
{
    // left mouse button is pressed.
}

The Mouse Cursor

You can set what cursor the mouse should use with the Mouse.SetCursor(MouseCursor cursor), and supply the cursor of your choice, i.e. MouseCursor.Crosshair. A full list of cursors can be found in the documentation .

You can also create a cursor from a texture with MouseCursor.FromTexture2D(Texture2D texture, int originX, int originY). The Texture2D is loaded with a ContentManager, just as we did in our HelloGame example. The originX and originY describe where the mouse pointer is in relation to the upper-left-hand corner of the image.

You can also hide the mouse cursor by setting the Game.IsMouseVisible property to false.