Introduced with this week’s Wayland Protocols 1.45 release is adding the Pointer Warp protocol to staging. The SDL hardware/software abstraction library commonly used by cross-platform games was quick to merge support for using the native Pointer Warp protocol on Wayland.
Wayland’s Pointer Warp protocol allows applications to request the pointer be moved to a position relative to a Wayland surface. This works nicely in combination with Wayland’s pointer constraint and pointer lock protocols for better handling first person shooters and other games natively under Wayland.
First person shooter games, strategy games, and other clip-to-drag-map type games/software commonly rely on pointer warp behavior. Almost immediately after the Wayland Protocols 1.45 release with this staging protocol in place, SDL merged support for this Wayland Pointer Warp support.
“wayland: implement the pointer warp protocol
The pointer warp protocol allows us to warp the pointer to a different position on the surface, without any hacks like locking and unlocking the pointer”
More details in this pull request for those interested. A nice step forward for native Wayland gaming.
