eclipse - How to move a mouse smoothly throughout the screen by using java?

Question

There is a mouseMove()method that makes the pointer jump to that location. I want to be able to make the mouse move smoothly throughout the screen. I need to write a method named mouseGLide() which takes a start x, start y, end x, end y, the total time the gliding should take, and the number of steps to make during the glide. It should animate the mouse pointer by moving from (start x, start y) to (end x, start y) in n steps. The total glide should take t milliseconds.

I don't know how to get started can anyone help me get started on this? Can anyone just tell me what steps I need to do in order to make this problem work.

Answer 1

To start off, let's just write out an empty method where the parameters are as you defined in your question.

public void mouseGlide(int x1, int y1, int x2, int y2, int t, int n) {

}

Next, let's create a Robot object and also calculate 3 pieces of information that'll help your future calculations. Don't forget to catch the exception from instantiating Robot.

Robot r = new Robot();
double dx = (x2 - x1) / ((double) n);
double dy = (y2 - y1) / ((double) n);
double dt = t / ((double) n);

dx represents the difference in your mouse's x coordinate everytime it moves while gliding. Basically it's the total move distance divided into n steps. Same thing with dy except with the y coordinate. dt is the total glide time divided into n steps.

Finally, construct a loop that executes n times, each time moving the mouse closer to the final location (taking steps of (dx, dy)). Make the thread sleep for dt milliseconds during each execution. The larger your n is, the smoother the glide will look.

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Final result:

public void mouseGlide(int x1, int y1, int x2, int y2, int t, int n) {
    try {
        Robot r = new Robot();
        double dx = (x2 - x1) / ((double) n);
        double dy = (y2 - y1) / ((double) n);
        double dt = t / ((double) n);
        for (int step = 1; step <= n; step++) {
            Thread.sleep((int) dt);
            r.mouseMove((int) (x1 + dx * step), (int) (y1 + dy * step));
        }
    } catch (AWTException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    } catch (InterruptedException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
}