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How to change position of the cursor using Javascript? [duplicate]

I'm building a HTML5 game and I am trying to put the mouse cursor over a certain control on a specific event so that moving in a specific direction always has the same result. Is this possible?

You cannot move the mousepointer with javascript.
Just think about the implications for a second, if you could ;)
User thinks: "hey I'd like to click this link"
Javascript moves mousecursor to another link
User clicks wrong link and inadvertently downloads malware that formats his c-drive and eats his candy

Run a small web server on the client machine. Can be a small 100kb thing. A Python / Perl script, etc.
Include a small, pre-compiled C executable that can move the mouse.
Run it as a CGI-script via a simple http call, AJAX, whatever - with the coordinates you want to move the mouse to, eg:
http://localhost:9876/cgi/mousemover?x=200&y=450
PS: For any problem, there are hundreds of excuses as to why, and how - it can't, and shouldn't - be done.. But in this infinite universe, it's really just a matter of determination - as to whether YOU will make it happen.

I would imagine you could accomplish placing the mouse cursor to a given area of the screen if you didn't use the real (system) mouse cursor.
For instance, you could create an image to act in place of your cursor, handle an event which upon detecting mouseenter into your scene, set the style on the system cursor to 'none' (sceneElement.style.cursor = 'none'), then would bring up a hidden image element acting as a cursor to be anywhere you like with in the scene based on a predefined axis/bounding box translation.
This way no matter how you moved the real cursor your translation method would keep your image cursor wherever you needed it.
edit: an example in jsFiddle using an image representation and forced mouse movement

Great question. This is really something missing from the Javascript browser API. I'm also working on a WebGL game with my team, and we need this feature. I opened an issue on Firefox's bugzilla so that we can start talking about the possibility of having an API to allow for mouse locking. This is going to be useful for all HTML5/WebGL game developers out there.
If you like, come over and leave a comment with your feedback, and upvote the issue:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=630979
Thanks!

You could detect position of the mouse pointer and then move the web page (with body position relative) so they hover over what you want them to click.
For an example you can paste this code on the current page in your browser console (and refresh afterwards)
var upvote_position = $('#answer-12878316').position();
$('body').mousemove(function (event) {
$(this).css({
position: 'relative',
left: (event.pageX - upvote_position.left - 22) + 'px',
top: (event.pageY - upvote_position.top - 35) + 'px'
});
});

So, I know this is an old topic, but I'll first say it isn't possible. The closest thing currently is locking the mouse to a single position, and tracking change in its x and y. This concept has been adopted by - it looks like - Chrome and Firefox. It's managed by what's called Mouse Lock, and hitting escape will break it. From my brief read-up, I think the idea is that it locks the mouse to one location, and reports motion events similar to click-and-drag events.
Here's the release documentation:FireFox: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Pointer_Lock_APIChrome: http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/mouse-lock
And here's a pretty neat demonstration: http://media.tojicode.com/q3bsp/

You can't move a mouse but can lock it.
Note: that you must call requestPointerLock in click event.
Small Example:
var canvas = document.getElementById('mycanvas');
canvas.requestPointerLock = canvas.requestPointerLock || canvas.mozRequestPointerLock || canvas.webkitRequestPointerLock;
canvas.requestPointerLock();
Documentation and full code example:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Pointer_Lock_API

Interesting. This isn't directly possible for the reasons called out earlier (spam clicks and malware injection), but consider this hack, which creates an impression of the same:
Step 1: Hide the cursor
Let's say you've a div, you can use this css property to hide the real cursor:
.your_div {
cursor: none
}
Step 2: Introduce a pseudo cursor
Simply create an image, a cursor look-alike,and place it within your webpage, with position:absolute.
Step 3: Track actual mouse movement
This is easy. Check internet on how to get real mouse location (X & Y coordinates).
Step 4: Move the pseudo cursor
As the actual cursor move, move your pseudo cursor by same X & Y difference. Similarly, you can always generate a click event at any location on your webpage with javascript magic (just search the internet on how-to).
Now at this point, you can control the pesudo cursor the way you want, and your user will get the impression that the real cursor is moving.
Fair Warning: Do not do it. No one wants their cursor or computer controlled this way, unless if you've some specific use-case, or if you are determined to flee your users away.

You can't move the mouse pointer using javascript, and thus for obvious security reasons. The best way to achieve this effect would be to actually place the control under the mouse pointer.

Couldn't this simply be done by getting actual position of the mouse pointer then calculating and compensating sprite/scene mouse actions based off this compensation?
For instance you need the mouse pointer to be bottom center, but it sits top left; hide the cursor, use a shifted cursor image. Shift the cursor movement and map mouse input to match re-positioned cursor sprite (or 'control') clicks When/if bounds are hit, recalculate. If/when the cursor actually hits the point you want it to be, remove compensation.
Disclaimer, not a game developer.

Bubbling scroll/mousewheel event

I've setup my app/website such that I have an absolute-positioned canvas element on top of a scrollpanel, when the scrollpanel scrolls I apply on offset to the canvas to make it look like the image is scrolling (this allows me to have huge canvas without the overhead of a huge canvas element). The problem is, when my mouse is over the canvas element, the scroll wheel does not work, since the scroll event does not bubble. In this case, however, I need the bubbling to get the scrollbar to work.
I'm using GWT for this, so I'd prefer not to rely on a jQuery solution (although a pure javascript solution would be ok) since it's kinda hard to mix the two. I can capture the mousewheel event, but the main problem with that is that it doesn't seem to differentiate between scrolling (up/down) and tilting of the wheel (left/right). I tried eventGetShiftKey(), eventGetButton(), eventGetType(), and some others but all those methods return the same exact result for scrolling and tilting (tilt left = scroll up, tilt right = scroll down).
It seems like the best way to handle this is to bubble the actual event to the scrollpanel (which by the way also contains the parent div that contains the absolute-positioned canvas), but I'm not sure if that's possible?

Mousewheel event does bubble, to differentiate between up/down scrolling use the event.wheelDelta and event.detail attributes.
MSDN: onmousewheel Event (IE, WebKit)
event.wheelDelta indicates the distance that the wheel button has rotated, expressed in multiples of 120. A positive value indicates that the wheel button has rotated away from the user. A negative value indicates that the wheel button has rotated toward the user.
MDC: DOMMouseScroll (Gecko)
event.detail specifies the number of "ticks" that the mouse wheel moved. Positive values mean down/right", negative up/left.
event.axis specifies the axis of the scroll gesture (horizontal or vertical). This attribute was added in Firefox 3.5
Also see this article which talks a bit about normalizing.

mouseover fired with mouse still and element moving

I am in a situation where I need jQuery's mouseover event to be fired when an element (in this case an image) moves under the mouse, so unlike the common situation is an element that is moving, not the mouse.
Do you know of any library/gist/technology that could help me in this sense?
I've tried with flash but with no luck, is this something than can actually be done?

You can track mouse position by binding a handler to mousemove on the body, and calculate after every move of the image whether the pointer is over it.

I ran across a similar issue. In my case I did a "good enough" workaround by keeping track of the time the mouse last moved and then in the mouseover handler seeing if the mouse had moved recently -- within 30ms of the current time. That way I can bail out in cases where the mouse didn't actually move, but I don't have to test the hitboxes myself -- something very hard to do right and fast, and fortunately something I can leave to the browser by doing this.

Move the mouse pointer to a specific position?

I'm building a HTML5 game and I am trying to put the mouse cursor over a certain control on a specific event so that moving in a specific direction always has the same result. Is this possible?

You cannot move the mousepointer with javascript.
Just think about the implications for a second, if you could ;)
User thinks: "hey I'd like to click this link"
Javascript moves mousecursor to another link
User clicks wrong link and inadvertently downloads malware that formats his c-drive and eats his candy

Run a small web server on the client machine. Can be a small 100kb thing. A Python / Perl script, etc.
Include a small, pre-compiled C executable that can move the mouse.
Run it as a CGI-script via a simple http call, AJAX, whatever - with the coordinates you want to move the mouse to, eg:
http://localhost:9876/cgi/mousemover?x=200&y=450
PS: For any problem, there are hundreds of excuses as to why, and how - it can't, and shouldn't - be done.. But in this infinite universe, it's really just a matter of determination - as to whether YOU will make it happen.

I would imagine you could accomplish placing the mouse cursor to a given area of the screen if you didn't use the real (system) mouse cursor.
For instance, you could create an image to act in place of your cursor, handle an event which upon detecting mouseenter into your scene, set the style on the system cursor to 'none' (sceneElement.style.cursor = 'none'), then would bring up a hidden image element acting as a cursor to be anywhere you like with in the scene based on a predefined axis/bounding box translation.
This way no matter how you moved the real cursor your translation method would keep your image cursor wherever you needed it.
edit: an example in jsFiddle using an image representation and forced mouse movement

Great question. This is really something missing from the Javascript browser API. I'm also working on a WebGL game with my team, and we need this feature. I opened an issue on Firefox's bugzilla so that we can start talking about the possibility of having an API to allow for mouse locking. This is going to be useful for all HTML5/WebGL game developers out there.
If you like, come over and leave a comment with your feedback, and upvote the issue:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=630979
Thanks!

You could detect position of the mouse pointer and then move the web page (with body position relative) so they hover over what you want them to click.
For an example you can paste this code on the current page in your browser console (and refresh afterwards)
var upvote_position = $('#answer-12878316').position();
$('body').mousemove(function (event) {
$(this).css({
position: 'relative',
left: (event.pageX - upvote_position.left - 22) + 'px',
top: (event.pageY - upvote_position.top - 35) + 'px'
});
});

So, I know this is an old topic, but I'll first say it isn't possible. The closest thing currently is locking the mouse to a single position, and tracking change in its x and y. This concept has been adopted by - it looks like - Chrome and Firefox. It's managed by what's called Mouse Lock, and hitting escape will break it. From my brief read-up, I think the idea is that it locks the mouse to one location, and reports motion events similar to click-and-drag events.
Here's the release documentation:FireFox: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Pointer_Lock_APIChrome: http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/mouse-lock
And here's a pretty neat demonstration: http://media.tojicode.com/q3bsp/

You can't move a mouse but can lock it.
Note: that you must call requestPointerLock in click event.
Small Example:
var canvas = document.getElementById('mycanvas');
canvas.requestPointerLock = canvas.requestPointerLock || canvas.mozRequestPointerLock || canvas.webkitRequestPointerLock;
canvas.requestPointerLock();
Documentation and full code example:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Pointer_Lock_API

Interesting. This isn't directly possible for the reasons called out earlier (spam clicks and malware injection), but consider this hack, which creates an impression of the same:
Step 1: Hide the cursor
Let's say you've a div, you can use this css property to hide the real cursor:
.your_div {
cursor: none
}
Step 2: Introduce a pseudo cursor
Simply create an image, a cursor look-alike,and place it within your webpage, with position:absolute.
Step 3: Track actual mouse movement
This is easy. Check internet on how to get real mouse location (X & Y coordinates).
Step 4: Move the pseudo cursor
As the actual cursor move, move your pseudo cursor by same X & Y difference. Similarly, you can always generate a click event at any location on your webpage with javascript magic (just search the internet on how-to).
Now at this point, you can control the pesudo cursor the way you want, and your user will get the impression that the real cursor is moving.
Fair Warning: Do not do it. No one wants their cursor or computer controlled this way, unless if you've some specific use-case, or if you are determined to flee your users away.

You can't move the mouse pointer using javascript, and thus for obvious security reasons. The best way to achieve this effect would be to actually place the control under the mouse pointer.

Couldn't this simply be done by getting actual position of the mouse pointer then calculating and compensating sprite/scene mouse actions based off this compensation?
For instance you need the mouse pointer to be bottom center, but it sits top left; hide the cursor, use a shifted cursor image. Shift the cursor movement and map mouse input to match re-positioned cursor sprite (or 'control') clicks When/if bounds are hit, recalculate. If/when the cursor actually hits the point you want it to be, remove compensation.
Disclaimer, not a game developer.

Detect if mouse button is down when the mouse entered active area (mouse was pressed down outside this area)

I am new to JavaScript so I might be missing something obvious here, but this is the problem. I am not getting the mouse down / up event if the event happened outside the active area under JavaScript control, so if the mouse enters the active area (onmouseover event) with the left button down, is there a way to know that the button is down?
Added info : Ideally, I would like to keep track of the mouse even outside the browser window - the way Google maps does - try clicking down the mouse button and move outside the browser - this works in chrome and with some quirks in Firefox. Is it possible to do this while remaining within the bounds of JavaScript or is it some proprietary stuff?

Yes: ensure that the mouse event handlers to detect a mouse-down event are attached to some element that occupies the entire viewport. For instance the HTML (document) element...