Inconsistent cursor changes in response to hotzones at the Main and Options menus.
Build r11869

On the main menu, the top four options all have hotzones that revert the cursor to the system cursor, while the Exit to Windows option shows its own gray variation on the standard animated blue cursor.

In the options menu, the "Music", "edge panning / fullscreen cursor capture", "fullscreen", and "cheat" each cause the cursor appearance to revert to the operating system cursor. All other options appear to stay with the blue animated cursor.

The Load Game & New Game menus all appear to have hotzones that respond correctly. Red cursor around deleting a game during game load, green around selecting a faction and purple when pointing at a faction which is not your selected faction.

No screenshots as I don't see an easy way to capture my cursor without getting into something like fraps and then extracting frames from that. I will do so if you need that.

Edit: This behavior is also seen on the "Dismiss" option of the pirate encounter dialog.

mharmless wrote:Inconsistent cursor changes in response to hotzones at the Main and Options menus.
On the main menu, the top four options all have hotzones that revert the cursor to the system cursor, while the Exit to Windows option shows its own gray variation on the standard animated blue cursor.

This is one to put under the heading of "questionable design choices I should probably revisit". Way back in the day, when the UI system was young, I got a bit over-excited by the capacity of the engine to associate different cursors with different UI elements. I decided that anything that corresponded to a "close" might as well have its own cursor. The cursor I decided to use was a grey arrow, which, unfortunately, is the same cursor I decided to use in cases where the element under the cursor was a disabled button.

Having a custom "close/exit" cursor is probably unnecessary, but, if we do have one, it should definitely be distinct from the "disabled button" cursor. So, yeah. This is a low priority issue, but, I do think it ought to be fixed. I'll add it to the list of things to address whenever we get around to plugging in better cursor assets.

sven wrote:This is one to put under the heading of "questionable design choices I should probably revisit". Way back in the day, when the UI system was young, I got a bit over-excited by the capacity of the engine to associate different cursors with different UI elements. I decided that anything that corresponded to a "close" might as well have its own cursor. The cursor I decided to use was a grey arrow, which, unfortunately, is the same cursor I decided to use in cases where the element under the cursor was a disabled button.

Having a custom "close/exit" cursor is probably unnecessary, but, if we do have one, it should definitely be distinct from the "disabled button" cursor. So, yeah. This is a low priority issue, but, I do think it ought to be fixed. I'll add it to the list of things to address whenever we get around to plugging in better cursor assets.

The grey cursor was just listed for comparison. The specific issue was seeing a system cursor instead of some sort of other cursor. It's the standard pointer-finger-with-thumb cursor that I see when I mouse over the submit button this very post. All the colored variations on the normal cursor are fine and dandy, this one feels like there should be a different cursor and isn't. It only appears on the specific items mentioned in Main and Options.

mharmless wrote:The grey cursor was just listed for comparison. The specific issue was seeing a system cursor instead of some sort of other cursor. It's the standard pointer-finger-with-thumb cursor that I see when I mouse over the submit button this very post. All the colored variations on the normal cursor are fine and dandy, this one feels like there should be a different cursor and isn't. It only appears on the specific items mentioned in Main and Options.

We don't have any nice custom mouse cursors yet (as I haven't invested the time to figure out how to make them), so all the cursors in the game are temporary placeholders. So when you see a "system" cursor, you're just seeing yet another placeholder, and there's no need to report it as a bug.