As I mentioned in the previous blog post, I ran into some issues with mapping the mouse movement from the screen into the game. One of those issues required venturing outside the bounds of the Unity API.

So, for the longest time, I had a certain number of playtesters who were reporting that the mouse movement in the game was very sluggish for them. Unfortunately, I was not able to reproduce this issue until I purchased another monitor. It’s possible that the issue still exists in other circumstances and for other reasons, but in this blog post I will be covering what I did to at least resolve the issue that I could reproduce.

The Issue

“…Unity does not always properly tell you the resolution information for the monitor that the game is running on, and instead shows you the resolution of the “main monitor” as it is set in the display settings in Windows.”

–Me, earlier

Although Unity provides us with a Screen structure that contains information corresponding to the resolution of the screen and the size of the game window, this information is not always correct for our purposes. I was wrong however, in the previous post, in asserting that it always pulls info from the main monitor; what it actually does depends on whether the game is running in windowed mode or fullscreen mode.

If the game is running in windowed mode, then Screen.currentResolution is the native resolution of the monitor that the game is currently running on. However, if the game is running in fullscreen mode, then currentResolution will always be the same as the game’s internal rendering resolution, regardless of the final output resolution.

For example, if we are running the game fullscreen at 1920×1080 but the display is 3840×2160, even though Unity upscales the game to 3840×2160 in order to make it fullscreen, currentResolution will be 1920×1080.

This is a big problem, because in order to scale our mouse movement from screen space into world space, we need to know the ratio between the size of the screen pixels and game pixels. In fullscreen mode, if the player is running below their native monitor resolution, a single pixel in the game’s internal resolution will correspond to multiple pixels on the screen because of upscaling.

Funnily enough, even though we can get this ratio in windowed mode, it is totally unnecessary there, as the game is be rendered unscaled in windowed mode.

The Solution

Because I couldn’t reproduce the issue for the longest time, my initial hunch here was that solving this problem would involve coming up with some other way to handle mouse input appropriately.

I hoped that the new input system for Unity would allow me to solve this issue, however my initial experiments showed some kind of cumulative performance issue which would cause the game to become unplayable after about 30 minutes or so. (I am not sure if this issue has been resolved at this point, but in any case, I decided to pursue other possibilities for fixing the mouse movement.)

Upon finally reproducing the issue, and coming to the diagnosis that I mentioned in the previous section of this article, I set about trying to get the information about the monitor in some other way.

There are other functions in the Unity API, but none of them were very helpful. For example, you can easily find information about all the monitors using the Display class, but there is no information about which monitor the game is currently running on. Display.main is simply the main system monitor according to Windows (this was the cause of my earlier confused reporting about Screen)

So I did what any confused programmer would do at this point; I googled the problem. This led me to this thread on the Unity forums, and some very confusing code.

There’s no real good way around saying it, I just copied and pasted that code and tried to work from there. This was after locating the only thing I could find written officially by Unity about this type of functionality, which was really no help at all.

(I also found a Unity Answers thread with some similar code to the thread on the forums.)

So, in hopes of explaining what I have learned in a better way, and adding one more random thing to the internet about how to handle calls to the Win32 api from Unity. I will post the entire class I wrote and we’ll go through the code as far as I can explain it.

First, the code:

using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;
using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

public static class MonitorInfo 
{
    [DllImport("user32.dll")]
    private static extern IntPtr GetActiveWindow();
    [DllImport("user32.dll")]
    private static extern IntPtr MonitorFromWindow(IntPtr hwnd, int flags);
    
    [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
    public struct RECT
    {
        public int left;
        public int top;
        public int right;
        public int bottom;
    }
    
    [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
    public class MONITORINFO
    {
        public int cbSize = Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(MONITORINFO));
        public RECT rcMonitor = new RECT();
        public RECT rcWork = new RECT();
        public int dwFlags = 0;
    }
    
    [DllImport("user32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto)] [return: MarshalAs( UnmanagedType.Bool )]
    private static extern bool GetMonitorInfo(IntPtr hmonitor, [In, Out] MONITORINFO info);
    
    
    public class monitor
    {
        public int width, height;
    }
    
    public static monitor current;
    static MONITORINFO info;
    public static bool isValid;
    
    public static void Update()
    {
        if(info == null) info = new MONITORINFO();
        isValid = GetMonitorInfo(MonitorFromWindow(GetActiveWindow(), 0), info);
        if(isValid)
        {
            if(current == null) current = new monitor();
            current.width = info.rcMonitor.right - info.rcMonitor.left;
            current.height = info.rcMonitor.bottom - info.rcMonitor.top;
        }
    }
    
    
}

Looking at the boilerplate at the top of the file, it’s pretty standard fare, however we need the following in order to interface between Unity’s API and the Win32 API layer:

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

Next, in our class we need to declare prototypes for the external functions that we plan on calling. We also tell Unity with the [DllImport] attribute to import these functions at runtime from the user32.dll file.

[DllImport("user32.dll")]
private static extern IntPtr GetActiveWindow();
[DllImport("user32.dll")]
private static extern IntPtr MonitorFromWindow(IntPtr hwnd, int flags);

These function definitions are based off the interfaces specified for these functions on MSDN:

GetActiveWindow()

HWND GetActiveWindow();

MonitorFromWindow()

HMONITOR MonitorFromWindow(
  HWND  hwnd,
  DWORD dwFlags
);

A big part of the annoyance here is these types that Microsoft uses for their API calls. What the heck is an HWND? Well, unfortunately I do have some experience with the terrible windows API, so I know that HWND is a Handle to a WiNDow. Similarly for HMONITOR, which is a handle to a monitor. And by handle, they just mean a 32-bit pointer.

God knows how you’re supposed to find this out, but the type that we’re supposed to use in C# to deal with 32-bit pointers is IntPtr.

Okay, so that just leaves DWORD to figure out.

Well, a DWORD, or Double WORD is just a 32-bit integer. This is essentially based off the idea that the processor word size is 16 bits (which it is not, but probably was at the time the Windows API was designed).

Anyway, moving on, we can just use int in our C# code, as the C# integer size is 32 bits. That gives us the definitions below:

private static extern IntPtr GetActiveWindow();
private static extern IntPtr MonitorFromWindow(IntPtr hwnd, int flags);

private and static may not be necessary for you, but in my case this is part of a static class so that it can be easily accessed at global scope from all my other classes in Unity. Static classes in C# require all members to be declared static (and unfortunately it doesn’t do this automatically, we actually have to type static a billion times). I also chose to make these members private because this makes this all a bit less worry-prone as a globally scoped class.

So, next we have a couple of structure definitions:

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
public struct RECT
{
    public int left;
    public int top;
    public int right;
    public int bottom;
}
[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
public class MONITORINFO
{
    public int cbSize = Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(MONITORINFO));
    public RECT rcMonitor = new RECT();
    public RECT rcWork = new RECT();
    public int dwFlags = 0;
}

These are again, based on the MSDN documentation for these structures.

Rect

typedef struct tagRECT {
  LONG left;
  LONG top;
  LONG right;
  LONG bottom;
} RECT, *PRECT, *NPRECT, *LPRECT;

MonitorInfo

typedef struct tagMONITORINFO {
  DWORD cbSize;
  RECT  rcMonitor;
  RECT  rcWork;
  DWORD dwFlags;
} MONITORINFO, *LPMONITORINFO;

We could use long in the C# code for the RECT members, and it would technically be more correct, however integers work just fine here. This may be some legacy feature of the API though.

We also need to use the [StructLayout] attributes, because normally, in C# the compiler is free to re-order the elements of a struct or class for memory efficiency purposes, however in our case we need the elements of these structures to be in the exact order that they are in the Win32 API.

One strange detail is this line:

public int cbSize = Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(MONITORINFO));

This is essentially code that I copied from the forum post I mentioned earlier, and as such I can’t entirely explain why it works this way, but the Marshal class is part of the System.Runtime.InteropServices that we included earlier. Specifically, it is a class that is used in order to convert between managed and unmanaged memory types.

Based on that, I can hazard a guess that what we’re doing here is actually pulling the size of the MONITORINFO struct from the Win32 API side of the the code, and not the size of the MONITORINFO class that we are currently in the process of defining in our own code. This seems reinforced by the fact that if we change this line to….

public int cbSize = sizeof(typeof(MONITORINFO));

…then Unity will complain that MONITORINFO is undefined.

Okay, moving on. Now we have this whopper of a function prototype definition.

[DllImport("user32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto)] [return: MarshalAs( UnmanagedType.Bool )]
private static extern bool GetMonitorInfo(IntPtr hmonitor, [In, Out] MONITORINFO info);

This is, of course, still based on the definition on the MSDN page:

GetMonitorInfoA()

BOOL GetMonitorInfoA(
  HMONITOR      hMonitor,
  LPMONITORINFO lpmi
);

“Wait, hold on, why is this called GetMonitorInfoA?”

Answering that will also answer why we need to have this CharSet = CharSet.Auto attribute as part of the dll import.

There are two versions of GetMonitorInfo in the Win32 api, one for ASCII characters (GetMonitorInfoA, which is the legacy version) and one for UTF-32 characters (GetMonitorInfoW).

“But wait, why on earth are we worried about text?”

We only have to care about this because this function could potentially return a MONITORINFOEX structure, which contains a string that is a name of the monitor. In our case, we are just throwing that data away and using the smaller MONITORINFO struct, but we still have to support it as part of our function prototype definition.

*sigh*

Another oddity as part of the Attribute definition is this:

[return: MarshalAs( UnmanagedType.Bool )]

Why do we have to marshal bools? Don’t ask me, but the function returns a bool specifying whether or not a monitor could successfully be found, and if you actually want to know that, you’ll need to marshal the bool across the API boundary, because managed and unmanaged bools are not compatible.

The only detail that might be confusing about the actual definition of the function is the [In, Out] attribute. This seems to be the way to specify that a parameter is passed by reference across the API boundary here. Changing it to ref does not work.

At this point, the rest of the code should be fairly understandable, if you have any experience with Unity C# coding:

public class monitor
{
    public int width, height;
}
    
public static monitor current;
static MONITORINFO info;
public static bool isValid;
    
public static void Update()
{
    if(info == null) info = new MONITORINFO();
    isValid = GetMonitorInfo(MonitorFromWindow(GetActiveWindow(), 0), info);
    if(isValid)
    {
        if(current == null) current = new monitor();
        current.width = info.rcMonitor.right - info.rcMonitor.left;
        current.height = info.rcMonitor.bottom - info.rcMonitor.top;
    }
}

One thing that’s worth noting, is that I keep track of a isValid bool publicly, so that I can always check if the calls to the Win32 api returned valid data before I go around using it.

Implementation

So with all that done, we can now change the code that handles the mouse scaling to the following:

Vector2 ScreenRes = new Vector2(Screen.width, Screen.height);
if(MonitorInfo.isValid) ScreenRes = new Vector2(MonitorInfo.current.width, MonitorInfo.current.height);

This means, that as long as we are able to return some valid information from the Win32 API, we will use that. If not, we will fall back to the Screen structure that Unity provides for us, which may be wrong in some cases.

Hope you learned something!