AGS in VM on Mac: Mouse problem with 3x nearest-neighbour filter

[cianty]

(Hold on, this is not another "will the game run on Mac OS X" question!)

I recently got myself a Macbook and among the various Windows software I need to continue to work with is - of course - AGS.
So I set up VirtualBox with a Windows 7 guest.

The problem I now see with AGS games (tried various) is this: If the game runs with 3x nearest-neighbor filter (or higher) the mouse is absolutely unusable. It seems like the game is hopelessly overextended with processing the mouse input. However, it does work fine with Filter set to none or 2x.

Switching the Driver option between "Direct3D 9" and "DirectDraw 5" has no effect.
I also tried a different machine using Fusion for the virtualization with Windows 8 and the result was the same.

So this is probably a question regarding the engine developers: Is there something special with 3x filter and up? Any way to fix this in an upcoming build of AGS?

If it weren't for this issue I'd be totally fine with running AGS this way on Mac.

[Crimson Wizard]

The problem I now see with AGS games (tried various) is this: If the game runs with 3x nearest-neighbor filter (or higher) the mouse is absolutely unusable. It seems like the game is hopelessly overextended with processing the mouse input. However, it does work fine with Filter set to none or 2x.

I have two quick questions:
1) Can you elaborate more on how the mouse acts? Does it move too slow, too fast, or else?
2) Which versions of AGS are affected? It would be good to know whether older versions (like 3.2.1 or 3.3.3) has this behavior or not.

[cianty]

Hi Crimson,

I have the problem in 3.3.3 and 3.4.0.5 which I just tried, so I believe it applies to about anything. I also tried RuinToRoehm and Camp1 with the same results, not sure what version they use, I guess 3.3.x?

You could say that the cursor is super slow. Imagine something like this being active:

onMouseMove{
  <doATonOfProcessingThatTakesSeveralSeconds>
}

All I basically do is move the mouse to the far left (e.g.), out of the windowed game. All of windows is now slowed down, busy processing the mouse actions. I continue to move the cursor around the window (being out of it) to the task bar. Windows is slow, you can see stuttering cursor moving in the game, following the path I moved the cursor a few seconds ago. Meanwhile my actual cursor reached the application icon in the task bar. I press right-click, nothing happens. You can watch the cursor in the game continue the path I made when I moved out of the window. Once that is finished, the right click I made on the application icon is processed. I click to close the app, everything is slow, eventually the game is closed and everything returns to normal.

I don't know if that was a helpful description. Basically it seems like the game is super busy trying to deal with the mouse input. Note that it only applies to mouse movement, though. Keyboard input is processed perfectly fine, so I can use the arrow keys to move the character and everything.

It's also interesting that filter "none" and "2x" are fine, but 3x/max etc cause the problems.