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Windows: prefer the virtual display and keep a game's cursor in the picture - #27

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Windows: prefer the virtual display and keep a game's cursor in the picture#27
MrBeldum wants to merge 4 commits into
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@MrBeldum MrBeldum commented Oct 14, 2026

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Uncommitted work from 2026-10-03 (Windows cursor handling for game streams), committed so it isn't lost. Draft: not yet run on Windows hardware (Hermes has been offline); CI's Windows job is the first compile of the Windows-only parts.

  • With capture on automatic, Latch prefers the Virtual Display Driver even while a physical monitor is connected; the engine restores the physical displays when the stream disconnects.
  • A windowless user task, LatchCursorUser, keeps a custom game cursor's whole shape inside the streamed display (crates/host/src/cursor.rs), so a cursor with a transparent top-left hotspot no longer disappears off the bottom/right edge. It follows resolution and cursor-shape changes, respects the game's own confinement, and lets go when the game hides its cursor.
  • Mac bundle staged in dist.noindex with the release workflow to match (the same change is in VPS desktops: own size, sizes below 1080p, Linux clipboard, pairing fix #26).

Checked on macOS: cargo fmt --check, clippy -D warnings for latch-host and latch-client.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

@MrBeldum MrBeldum mentioned this pull request Oct 18, 2026
Open
MrBeldum added a commit that referenced this pull request Oct 18, 2026
@MrBeldum @claude
Windows: prefer the virtual display and keep a game's cursor in the p…
e2ac0b0 
…icture

Work from 2026-10-03, not yet tried on Windows hardware (Hermes offline).

- With capture on automatic, Latch prefers the Virtual Display Driver even
  while a physical monitor is connected; the engine restores the physical
  displays when the stream disconnects.
- A windowless user task (LatchCursorUser) keeps a custom game cursor's
  whole shape inside the streamed display (crates/host/src/cursor.rs), so
  a cursor with a transparent top-left hotspot no longer disappears off
  the bottom or right edge; it follows resolution and shape changes,
  respects the game's own confinement and lets go when the game hides
  its cursor.
- Mac bundle staged in dist.noindex, release workflow to match.

Rebased onto PR #26 (fix/vps-stream-clipboard). Both changed how the
stream profile is kept, and neither side's version could simply win: #26's
one-time marker (now stream-profile-v4) would never run the virtual
display choice on a host that already has it, and #27's reconcile every
30 s re-wrote all of the engine conf, so settings an owner picked in the
engine's own page (nvenc_twopass, minimum_fps_target, the display option)
were put back and the engine restarted, and on Linux #26's engine conf
would have been enforced the same way. Now:

- The full engine conf stays a versioned one-time migration, exactly as
  #26 has it, on every platform.
- On Windows only, once that is in place, the service keeps just the
  capture display current every 30 s (virtual_display::capture/follow):
  output_name and dd_configuration_option, nothing else, and it logs
  which keys it changed whenever it restarts the engine.
- The display ID Latch set is remembered (capture-display in the data
  directory), so a driver that comes back under a new ID after a
  reinstall still counts as automatic and capture follows it, instead of
  staying pointed at a display that no longer exists. When the owner
  picks another display, the display option Latch set goes back.
- A PC that never had the driver is not asked anything.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
@MrBeldum
MrBeldum force-pushed the feat/windows-cursor-in-picture branch from ff41047 to d308f7e Compare October 18, 2026 00:45
@MrBeldum
MrBeldum changed the base branch from main to fix/audit-2026-10-14 October 18, 2026 00:45
@MrBeldum

MrBeldum commented Oct 18, 2026

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Restacked on #28 (the audit fixes, itself on #26) and reworked after review:

Still untested on Windows hardware: the cursor guard and VDD follow. CI compiles and tests the pure parts.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

MrBeldum added a commit that referenced this pull request Oct 18, 2026
@MrBeldum @claude
Windows: prefer the virtual display and keep a game's cursor in the p…
91fa2f4 
…icture

Work from 2026-10-03, not yet tried on Windows hardware (Hermes offline).

- With capture on automatic, Latch prefers the Virtual Display Driver even
  while a physical monitor is connected; the engine restores the physical
  displays when the stream disconnects.
- A windowless user task (LatchCursorUser) keeps a custom game cursor's
  whole shape inside the streamed display (crates/host/src/cursor.rs), so
  a cursor with a transparent top-left hotspot no longer disappears off
  the bottom or right edge; it follows resolution and shape changes,
  respects the game's own confinement and lets go when the game hides
  its cursor.
- Mac bundle staged in dist.noindex, release workflow to match.

Rebased onto PR #26 (fix/vps-stream-clipboard). Both changed how the
stream profile is kept, and neither side's version could simply win: #26's
one-time marker (now stream-profile-v4) would never run the virtual
display choice on a host that already has it, and #27's reconcile every
30 s re-wrote all of the engine conf, so settings an owner picked in the
engine's own page (nvenc_twopass, minimum_fps_target, the display option)
were put back and the engine restarted, and on Linux #26's engine conf
would have been enforced the same way. Now:

- The full engine conf stays a versioned one-time migration, exactly as
  #26 has it, on every platform.
- On Windows only, once that is in place, the service keeps just the
  capture display current every 30 s (virtual_display::capture/follow):
  output_name and dd_configuration_option, nothing else, and it logs
  which keys it changed whenever it restarts the engine.
- The display ID Latch set is remembered (capture-display in the data
  directory), so a driver that comes back under a new ID after a
  reinstall still counts as automatic and capture follows it, instead of
  staying pointed at a display that no longer exists. When the owner
  picks another display, the display option Latch set goes back.
- A PC that never had the driver is not asked anything.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
@MrBeldum
MrBeldum force-pushed the feat/windows-cursor-in-picture branch from d308f7e to 52d301d Compare October 18, 2026 00:52
MrBeldum added a commit that referenced this pull request Oct 18, 2026
@MrBeldum @claude
Windows: prefer the virtual display and keep a game's cursor in the p…
b68ded9 
…icture

Work from 2026-10-03, not yet tried on Windows hardware (Hermes offline).

- With capture on automatic, Latch prefers the Virtual Display Driver even
  while a physical monitor is connected; the engine restores the physical
  displays when the stream disconnects.
- A windowless user task (LatchCursorUser) keeps a custom game cursor's
  whole shape inside the streamed display (crates/host/src/cursor.rs), so
  a cursor with a transparent top-left hotspot no longer disappears off
  the bottom or right edge; it follows resolution and shape changes,
  respects the game's own confinement and lets go when the game hides
  its cursor.
- Mac bundle staged in dist.noindex, release workflow to match.

Rebased onto PR #26 (fix/vps-stream-clipboard). Both changed how the
stream profile is kept, and neither side's version could simply win: #26's
one-time marker (now stream-profile-v4) would never run the virtual
display choice on a host that already has it, and #27's reconcile every
30 s re-wrote all of the engine conf, so settings an owner picked in the
engine's own page (nvenc_twopass, minimum_fps_target, the display option)
were put back and the engine restarted, and on Linux #26's engine conf
would have been enforced the same way. Now:

- The full engine conf stays a versioned one-time migration, exactly as
  #26 has it, on every platform.
- On Windows only, once that is in place, the service keeps just the
  capture display current every 30 s (virtual_display::capture/follow):
  output_name and dd_configuration_option, nothing else, and it logs
  which keys it changed whenever it restarts the engine.
- The display ID Latch set is remembered (capture-display in the data
  directory), so a driver that comes back under a new ID after a
  reinstall still counts as automatic and capture follows it, instead of
  staying pointed at a display that no longer exists. When the owner
  picks another display, the display option Latch set goes back.
- A PC that never had the driver is not asked anything.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
@MrBeldum
MrBeldum force-pushed the feat/windows-cursor-in-picture branch from 52d301d to 79ed8a1 Compare October 18, 2026 01:10
MrBeldum and others added 4 commits October 17, 2026 18:35
@MrBeldum @claude
Windows: prefer the virtual display and keep a game's cursor in the p…
2eae45c 
…icture

Work from 2026-10-03, not yet tried on Windows hardware (Hermes offline).

- With capture on automatic, Latch prefers the Virtual Display Driver even
  while a physical monitor is connected; the engine restores the physical
  displays when the stream disconnects.
- A windowless user task (LatchCursorUser) keeps a custom game cursor's
  whole shape inside the streamed display (crates/host/src/cursor.rs), so
  a cursor with a transparent top-left hotspot no longer disappears off
  the bottom or right edge; it follows resolution and shape changes,
  respects the game's own confinement and lets go when the game hides
  its cursor.
- Mac bundle staged in dist.noindex, release workflow to match.

Rebased onto PR #26 (fix/vps-stream-clipboard). Both changed how the
stream profile is kept, and neither side's version could simply win: #26's
one-time marker (now stream-profile-v4) would never run the virtual
display choice on a host that already has it, and #27's reconcile every
30 s re-wrote all of the engine conf, so settings an owner picked in the
engine's own page (nvenc_twopass, minimum_fps_target, the display option)
were put back and the engine restarted, and on Linux #26's engine conf
would have been enforced the same way. Now:

- The full engine conf stays a versioned one-time migration, exactly as
  #26 has it, on every platform.
- On Windows only, once that is in place, the service keeps just the
  capture display current every 30 s (virtual_display::capture/follow):
  output_name and dd_configuration_option, nothing else, and it logs
  which keys it changed whenever it restarts the engine.
- The display ID Latch set is remembered (capture-display in the data
  directory), so a driver that comes back under a new ID after a
  reinstall still counts as automatic and capture follows it, instead of
  staying pointed at a display that no longer exists. When the owner
  picks another display, the display option Latch set goes back.
- A PC that never had the driver is not asked anything.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
@MrBeldum @claude
Cursor guard: hold back only cursors that would vanish, only while a …
c71a4fd 
…viewer watches

The guard confined every custom cursor by its whole bitmap. A 32x32 or
64x64 game cursor with its tip at the hotspot (most RTS and MOBA
cursors) stopped 31-63 px short of the right and bottom edges: edge
panning never triggered and buttons in that band could not be clicked,
for no gain, since that tip was always visible at the edge. It now reads
the cursor's pixels (alpha, or the AND/XOR masks) and only keeps the
visible pixel nearest the hotspot on screen; a cursor drawn at its
hotspot is never clipped.

The guard was on whenever the engine reported a running app, and the
Desktop app keeps running after the viewer disconnects, so a local
player's cursor stayed confined until the engine restarted. It now also
needs the engine log's last word to be CLIENT CONNECTED (a disconnect or
a ping timeout ends it).

The node launched PowerShell every 30 s to check the guard's task, on
the service's tick thread. A node in the desktop session (the Run-key
start) now runs the guard as its own child process; only a node in
session 0 uses the task, registered once, without a logon trigger that
could start it for a dead node's process ID, and run with schtasks. The
guard checks that its parent PID is still a latch-host process, and
sleeps a second at a time while no viewer is connected.

The clip bookkeeping is a small state machine with the Windows calls
behind a trait, so its rules are tested: a game's own confinement is
kept and put back, a clip someone else set is never lifted, a desktop
that was free is freed again (not set to the old desktop's size), and a
clip left by a guard that was killed is recognised and lifted.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
@MrBeldum @claude
Virtual display: read the device list Sunshine logs after a layout re…
5ab3ddd 
…covery

After a stream, Sunshine's display recovery logs "Currently available
devices:" with a list of "<device_id> - <friendly_name>" strings
(display_device.cpp, try_revert_settings), not the objects it logs at
startup. output_in() parsed that list, found no friendly_name on the
strings and reported no virtual display, so a host still on automatic
capture was not switched to the driver until a later engine start
logged the object form. Both forms are read now; the latest device list
still decides, and other text that begins "Currently available " is
skipped instead of hiding the list before it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
@MrBeldum @claude
Cursor guard: read the engine's log through the streamer's viewer check
1485721 
One reading of 'is a viewer connected' for the update deferral, setup
and the cursor guard: the last CLIENT CONNECTED, CLIENT DISCONNECTED or
Ping Timeout line decides.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
@MrBeldum
MrBeldum force-pushed the feat/windows-cursor-in-picture branch from 79ed8a1 to 1485721 Compare October 18, 2026 01:35
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