Clicks not working in Dwarf Fortress (steam version)

[mimuki]

This issue also exists in keynav, but I figured it would be helpful to also mention it here. Any keynavish clicks in DF don't actually click anything in game. I've tried both fullscreen and windowed modes, with no luck. This might be something that has to be fixed by the DF devs, but I wanted to make an issue here so that when I tell them about it, I at least have someone familiar with the keynavish codebase to back me up when i say "hey DF devs pls fix".

Observed on Windows 10, version 2004

[mimuki]

I've been asking around the internet, and someone more tech literate than me had this to say, which might be useful to know? I get the impression that this implies an incompatibility "higher up the chain", but make of it what you will.

DF uses SDL for input, and calls this -
https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL2/SDL_PollEvent
KeyNavish on Windows uses standard Window messaging for clicks, and calls this -
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/nf-winuser-sendinput
I took a brief look in DF, SDL, and KeyNavish, and it's not obvious to me why they aren't communicating with each other properly without really getting into the weeds.
I'm not sure where you'd ask for support, but you'd probably be asking something along the lines of "Hey, my accessibility software uses SendInput(...) and an SDL-based game I like isn't recognizing the inputs properly".

[lesderid]

Interesting, looks like I can reproduce it with the free version of Dwarf Fortress. I'll try to debug it, but sadly I'm not very hopeful there is an easy fix for this.

[lesderid]

There seems to be something specific about the game code that is keeping it from working. The events received from SDL are identical. I added some debug output to SDL and got the following results:

Real click:

mouse button event: type:  down, device:  0, button:  1, state:  pressed, coords: (  590,   481),
mouse button event: type:    up, device:  0, button:  1, state: released, coords: (  590,   481),

keynavish click:

mouse button event: type:  down, device:  0, button:  1, state:  pressed, coords: (  590,   481),
mouse button event: type:    up, device:  0, button:  1, state: released, coords: (  590,   481),

[lesderid]

So apparently the game requires a delay between click events (mouse down and mouse up) for them to register. The commit I just pushed (binaries here: https://github.com/lesderid/keynavish/releases/tag/v1.5.0) adds an option to set a delay between the events.

You can configure it globally (just add a line with x-set-delay <milliseconds> somewhere in your config), or you can add it to a command sequence (e.g. space warp,x-set-delay <milliseconds>,click 1,x-set-delay 0,end) so it only applies to certain configured keys.

The command (x-set-delay) is prefixed with x- because it's not implemented in the original keynav.

Edit: For Dwarf Fortress, a value of 5 (milliseconds) seems to work. It might be tied to frame rate, so I'd play around with a few values to see what works for you.

Edit 2: FWIW, this a hack. The DF devs should keep processing events until SDL_PollEvent returns 0.