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Often menu commands apply to a particular place within a level. The provided mechanism to select such a place is called mouse selection. While it’s enabled the mouse cursor can be used to select a particular place by simply pointing at the construction held by it. The selected place’s construction will be shown in a brighter or darker color than its surroundings (depending upon the video and environment modes) like in the picture below.
As the user moves the cursor across the screen, the limits of each selected place is determined by which construction it holds, roughly considering the depth of the region the cursor points to.
It’s easy to apply a place-targeting command to a whole contiguous region of the current room by simply holding down the command key while moving the mouse cursor through each one of its places. For example, a common application of this is to quickly populate a room with walls and normal floors before changing smaller details when editing a level.
Mouse selection is also used by menu commands to give visual feedback on the placement of a particular object within the game world. Some commands move the mouse selection arbitrarily and lock it on a particular object, so the user doesn’t interfere with their selection-based report mechanism until them return. In case these commands need to report a nonexistent or invalid place (or object) they lock the mouse cursor on the screen’s very top left, meaning that the mouse selection is pointing nowhere. The mouse selection stores all coordinates of a place within a level, meaning that commands may change the currently displayed room as well, when moving or restoring the mouse selection.
The mouse selection can’t be used to select constructions of the rooms above and below while at the current room, because the topmost pixels are reserved to selection pointing nowhere and the bottom region to the message line and menu system.
The mouse cursor changes to indicate conditions related to the the mouse selection and the menu system. Four different cursors are used for this purpose, that (unless otherwise noted) have the following meanings:
DEFAULT
no other situation applies
LINK
the current menu command expects or sets a valid mouse selection
QUESTION
the current menu command expects input
UNAVAILABLE
the mouse selection or some object selected using the menu system is somehow invalid
While the mouse selection is enabled the horizontal and vertical mouse wheels may be used to navigate through linked rooms. Rolling the horizontal wheel changes the currently displayed room to the room at left or right, depending upon direction. The vertical wheel works in a similar fashion for the rooms above and below. Holding CTRL while rolling either of the wheels invert their meaning, that is, the horizontal wheel becomes vertical and vice-versa. This way, if the user’s mouse has only one wheel, he can simulate the missing one by holding CTRL. While the mouse selection is enabled, the third mouse button (usually the one activated by pressing the vertical wheel) sets the currently selected room to the one the kid is in. It’s also possible to navigate through linked rooms by using key bindings. See Level navigation. However, this requires the menu system to be disabled first.
The mouse selection honors the display flip mode and the mouse wheels honor the gamepad flip mode. See Peripherals.
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