DirectInput question

The mouse information updates VERY fast/often. Its very possible that you're buffering your information and not clearing it (or not clearing it enough) -- which would lead to a buffer overflow. I suppose if you want to be lazy you could just clear the buffer if it throws an exception.

Should I use the immidiate approach (i.e. using the GetDeviceState() ) ?
What is the difference between the two ?

If your mouse movement is important and your frame rate can become slow, you need a large buffer for mouse input. This is the code I use for DI8+:

That is, a minimum of 1000 entries can be stored up. I've never had any kind of problem except on loading screens. You need to avoid throwing errors because of overflows.

Usually, buttons will come through even though an overflow occurs, and this means the mouse or such tried to move somewhere and click. But since you had an overflow, the mouse won't reach it's goal, and the click is still logged. So they will click, but in the wrong place. I would ignore any button presses or drags when you detect an overflow.

Oops, to answer your second question:

Buffered input stores events as they happen into a buffer. When your program grabs this buffer, you get a list of events in the same order they were executed. This means if a button is pressed and released before your engine even knows it was pressed at all, it will see both of these events taking place.

Unbuffered input is as simple as seeing what state the button currently has. The button can be pressed and released in between your polling method calls and you'll have no idea it happened. It can become very ugly unless your frame rate is constant. I would guess that a human usually holds a button down for about 50 to 200 milliseconds when they are trying to press and release. So if no more than 30 milliseconds passes in a frame, it's unlikely you will miss anything. It all depends on how much caffeine the user has had [disturbed]

The mouse and other wheels and axes are a little different. With buffered input, every time the device is checked by your hardware, it stores another update. This means the number of updates can grow pretty quick. With unbuffered input, you usually just grab the absolute mouse position and subtract it's last position to see how much it moved. Although you would have no idea the order of movements it made, which could be important for painting or drawing selection shapes or other such things.