Handle raw mouse movement?

Hi, is there any way to prevent that the cursor position changes when the physical mouse moves, and at the same time see the movement of the mouse?

If the task is platform dependent, the platform used is Windows.

The reason I'm asking is that the mouse is going to be used to steer a robot arm when ctrl is held down. So pressing down ctrl should change the task of the mouse, from moving the mouse cursor to moving a robot arm. Hence, the cursor should freeze completely when ctrl is pressed down. It would be good if it was possible to take such control over the mouse buttons as well (i.e. preventing clicking and scrolling while using these events yourself), but maybe that is impossible in windows.

It's for sure possible, but you need a library that deals with "mouse events". I imagine on windows that's the Win32 API.

E.G. and for instance:

ShowCursor Function (Windows)
(although this may not be what you want exactly)

SetCapture Function (Windows)

I don't think your program can prevent the user from physically pushing a mouse button. You can ignore the message that your program will get, though.

ShowCursor might be useful although it's not necessary. SetCapture might also be good, especially since I don't want buttons in other applications to be clicked accidentally, for example. However, this doesn't solve my problem.

The question was never about preventing the user from physically moving the mouse. The mouse is after all going to be used for steering a robot arm. The question was to prevent the normal effects moving the mouse and using it's buttons usually have, while at the same time using the raw data from those events in my own program to steer the arm.

Edit: What I have found, is the RAWMOUSE structure in windows.h. I'm not really sure how it works or if it can help me preventing unwanted effects of mouse events, but I hope that it can help me to collect that raw data I wanted.

SetWindowsHookEx Function (Windows)

You can install a global mouse or low level mouse hook.

From memory if you don't pass it down the hook chain the data is not passed to other applications, and you can use the data. Which is, I think, what you want.