Get mouse position in world?

Question

You can get mouse position from the viewport, but how can you convert it to world position? Do I need to do it manually?

Answer 1

If you want the mouse coordinates relative to your canvas, each Node2D inherits from a CanvasItem and gives a method called get_global_mouse_pos().

http://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_canvasitem.html#class-canvasitem-get-global-mouse-pos

Comments

This is correct and works for me, but the correct name of the function is now get_global_mouse_position()

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getglobalmouse_position()

Answer 2

I found get_global_mouse_position() to be insufficient in certain cases, i.e. when you wanna make an object (Light, Sprite) follow the cursor AND ProjectSettings.display/window/stretch/aspect is set to expand AND the window is resized. The object will then be misaligned.

So if you have a Light or Sprite or other Node2D that has an offset property, you can compensate for this effect like this:

position = get_global_mouse_position()
offset = get_local_mouse_position()

I assume the reason is that a global transformation is implicitly applied that results in a change of the local position (you can check by debugging get_global_transform() and realize that get_global_transform().xform_inv(get_global_mouse_position()) == get_local_mouse_position())