The instructions given for using Cursor Lock in games launched through Steam in a previous post were rather out of date. But I’ve become aware of a new and perhaps better method for using the two together. I say better because it doesn’t require creating shortcuts; however, there is still some command line tomfoolery to mess with.
Here’s what to do:
- Open the Cursor Lock Setup.
- Setup the options for Cursor Lock how you would normally, except put %command% in the Open Program field. The field will turn red, but that’s okay, we’re not actually going to create a shortcut. (See the first image below.)
- Go to your Steam library and right-click on the game in question and select Properties. Your should see a “Launch Options” field.
- Find the path to Cursor Lock. The quickest way is probably to go to your Start Menu (or whatever Microsoft is passing off as a start menu these days) and find the Start User Mode shortcut. Right-click this shortcut and go to Properties. You’ll find the path to Cursor Lock in the Target field under the Shortcut tab. Copy the part in quotes, including the quotes.
- Paste the path to Cursor Lock into the Launch Options field in Steam. Then go back to Cursor Lock Setup and copy the command line options at the bottom. Paste what you’ve copied at the end of that same Launch Options field. (See the second image below.)
- You’re done. Just X out of the dialog and play your game. Cursor Lock will open and close in tandem with your game. You’ll need to do this for every Steam game you wish to use with Cursor Lock, though.
As you may have guessed, the %command% pattern is replaced by Steam automatically with the path to the game. This useful feature allows us to wrap any commands we would want around our game command. If you’re already making use of the Launch Options field for other commands, you can put those into the Open Program Args field (/P) for Cursor Lock to pass them along to your game—see the screenshots above for an example.
hmm actually re: last comment, this method doesn’t seem to work at all for TF2 (and probably other games on the same engine). but the old shortcut method does so o well
i don’t know what’s going on exactly, but this method (as well as the old shortcut method) doesn’t work if your steam.exe and game.exe are on different drive letters, it seems. i had to move TF2 to the same drive where steam.exe is located, otherwise launching through the shortcut or with the launch commands produced this error:
“Setup file ‘gameinfo.txt’ doesn’t exist in subdirectory ‘hl2’.”
That seems like an unusual issue. Nothing jumps out at me as to why that might be the case. Perhaps it is a security feature in Steam? If anyone can corroborate this report, please do.
Amazingly useful!