Editor Mouse Cursor Tracking

Unity Engine
1

Hello! I have been fidgeting around with this all night and have pretty much exhausted my thoughts on the matter, as well as any information I thought I could find here.

I am designing a basic tile based 2D game-a-ma-bob, and to make designing levels for it less psychosis inducing, I am creating a little something for the Editor. The main part of this Editor script involves painting a texture onto the tiles, so the designer doesn’t have to go piecemeal, clicking every single tile and manually selecting their texture; with a few thousand tiles, that could get a tad tiresome. Simply select the texture to paint on, track the mouse over the 3D port, and report the objects it traces over. Easy, right?

Well, I thought so too, at first. It seems all the methods I have tried work only during Runtime. For example, while I did find methods of getting an accurate cursor position, I have yet to find a way to get accurate click events/inputs, and none of the unit conversions work to translate the mouse coords to world coords (no active cameras due to not being in runtime, for example). I literally went through every related class I could think of to find possible solutions, and couldn’t seem to whip one up.

While I obviously missed something, I know at least one of you can help me figure this out!

Is there any trick to working with the mouse in the Editor? A way to get good XY coordinates for finding world objects, a way to detect the apparently indetectable left click (Mouse is technically outside the custom window), and of course a way to prevent the mouse from selecting everything it traces over? If anyone can help steer me to the right classes, functions, and techniques, I would be quite grateful!

2

Hi, welcome to the forum!

Have you tried Camera.current? I think it is supposed to return the scene camera when you are in the editor. Assuming it works then ScreenPointToRay or ScreenToWorldPoint should still work OK.

3

I’m using raycasting for tracking a mouse in my level editor.

You may have to alter this code, but this is mine. I do have it stuck on one Z-axis, so you will have to program that.
(Javascript)

if (Physics.Raycast (rayObject, hitObject, 100)) {
    Debug.DrawLine (rayObject.origin, hitObject.point);
    var placedObject = Instantiate(objectType,Vector3(hitObject.point.x,hitObject.point.y,0),objectRotation) as GameObject;
}