Mouse Following a GUI using Mouse.Target

[aetherloric]

Why don’t you just use Frame:TweenPosition seeing as you aren’t tweening anything else?

[FoxythDou]

Hm. Confused. I’ll still tween some menus and stuff, such as save slots n stuff. I don’t really know what you mean by that.

[Clueless_Brick]

Apologies for the late reply. Wanted to clear some things up.

For general click, it’s a good idea to use UserInputService and not going through Mouse.Target because the staff have been heavily discouraging this.

Here’s how you would do it:

--Place this in a Localscript under a frame

local UserInputService = game:GetService("UserInputService")
local RunService = game:GetService("RunService")
local gui = script.Parent

local function moveGuiToMouse()
    local mouseLocation = UserInputService:GetMouseLocation()
    gui.Position = UDim2.fromOffset(mouseLocation.X, mouseLocation.Y)
end

RunService:BindToRenderStep("moveGuiToMouse", 1, moveGuiToMouse)

This will have a frame under your mouse at all times. Source from the Wiki, though be warned that the code there errors immediately when ran due to there only being 2 vectors and not 4 different ones as UDim2 implies. To fix this, replace one of the similar lines with:

gui.Position = Udim2.fromOffset(mouseLocation.X,mouseLocation.Y)

or just copy the code I typed in this reply. The only difference for this is offset.

Alright, now that we’ve got that out of the way: how do we define the target of the Mouse. To do that, we must create a ray to the mouse and whatever is inside the ray the mouse will pickup. In better words, here how @sjr04 explained it to me:

@sjr04

I have a module called PlayerMouse2 which is an alternative to the legacy PlayerMouse instance. It gets the target through UserInputService as well as raycasting and exposes api for a few more things if you just want something that works. ( PlayerMouse2.Target )

But if you want to know how you can do this, then let me explain.

First you will want the X and Y (2D) coordinates of the mouse. You can get them using UserInputService:GetMouseLocation which returns a Vector2 describing this.

local mouse_location = UIS:GetMouseLocation()

Then you want to create a ray from those coordinates using Camera:ViewportPointToRay .

local unscaled_ray = camera:ViewportPointToRay(mouse_location.X, mouse_location.Y - 36)

Great! Now we have a Ray object. Now we want to extend this ray to 1000 studs because that is what was the length iirc.

local result = workspace:Raycast(unscaled_ray.Origin, unscaled_ray.Direction*1000)

Now we got a RaycastResult.

Then we check if the ray hit something.

local target
if result then
    target = result.Instance
end

There we go! Now you have the Target . This is also a way to get the position from mouse.Hit through the Position field of RaycastResult

See further replies in the thread if you’re still confused by how this works. But here’s how I wrote my function:

-- InputChanged because the mouse is constantly going to be in movement, hence the conditional statement on the second line
UIS.InputChanged:Connect(function(input,gameProcessed)
	if input.UserInputType == Enum.UserInputType.MouseMovement then
		local mouse_location = UIS:GetMouseLocation()
		local unscaled_ray = camera:ViewportPointToRay(mouse_location.X, mouse_location.Y - 36)
		
		local result = workspace:Raycast(unscaled_ray.Origin, unscaled_ray.Direction*1000)
		
		local target
		if result then
			target = result.Instance
			-- Making sure your Client is alive and existent
			if player ~= nil then
				if player.Character:FindFirstChild("Humanoid").Health > 0 then
					if target:IsA("BasePart") and target.Material == "Wood" then
                        --Make Gui do stuff by digging into the PlayerGui
                    end
				end
			end
		end
	end
end)

I’m not sure if this code is stable considering that there is no BindToRenderStep, but I’ll leave that up to the experts out there to correct me on this.

Wow this reply turned out way longer than I thought

[FoxythDou]

Whoa! that is pretty long, I didn’t know this would go more complex than what i thought. ill try to digest this.

[Clueless_Brick]

I was pretty skeptical and amazed by the complexity on this as well.

I watched a few video tutorials on how to code UserInputService and read up the wiki on how Rays work: I recommend you do the same otherwise this probably won’t make sense.

[FoxythDou]

@sjr04

Mouse is not deprecated, at the moment it is just legacy, although i imagine it being deprecated in the next few years. I don’t believe explanations provided are too complex, i think it would be good if you showed what you didn’t understand so we can break it down for you.

Hm, I read the Post you brought up and as @sjr04 said, yes. it would be obsolete in the next few years, but i think i should wait until roblox would make this much simpler and better for UIS and I think i would stay with Mouse for now until roblox upgrades the system.