So I just gifted this game to my sweetie, who's a lefty and has her mouse set up for left-handed orientation in the Windows control panel. Games that ignore this setting (because they used DirectInput improperly) are a pet peeve of hers. She finds them unplayable, and it appears that Torchlight is in this category.

Is there a way to get Torchlight to observe a left-handed mouse orientation (i.e. right-most button is primary select and left-most button is secondary select)?

After a bunch of Web searches, I found this page on Runic Games' discussion fora, which reads in part: So it looks like there's no joy here, which is a damned shame. (If you know otherwise, feel free to post.)

Just use the program you mentioned - AutoHotkey.
http://ahkscript.org/

I suspect my sweetie will be reluctant to install a third-party workaround for something the game should be supporting natively, but I'll investigate it. Thanks.

Correct. That's true if you use event messages arriving at your Windows program's message queue. However, if you use DirectInput, all the bets are off, and you have to do all mappings manually.

<SAGA>
The last time I dealt with this in depth was around 1997 or so when I was asked to add force-feedback joystick support to a game called Return Fire II. The only supported way of doing it was via some convoluted nonsense requiring the use of DirectInput. However, the rest of the game already used DirectInput for other things, so integrating it wasn't any more painful than working with Windows in the first place.

Then I was asked to create an in-game command console, and this is where DirectInput revealed itself to be completely $(EXPLETIVE) $(EXPLETIVE) useless for any peripheral that wasn't an actual game controller. DirectInput's "documentation" stated that it treated the keyboard as if it were a 104-button gamepad, which is an amusing idea until you want to know if the user has, for example, pressed the 'A' key. DI only reported raw key scancodes. Moreover, these scancodes existed in a namespace distinct from the ones available on the normal Windows message queue (reported via WM_KEYDOWN). If you looked at the #include files, you'd see the DI and WM_KEYDOWN scancodes were (nearly) identical, but the namespaces nevertheless had to be treated as different. That meant you couldn't use any of the mapping functions available to normal Windows apps that let you map a scancode to an ASCII character, or vice-versa. You also didn't get any keymatic support (auto-repeating of keys held down), and especially annoying was that you couldn't make any use of Windows support for international character sets and keyboards.

Eventually I said, "$(EXPLETIVE) this," and ripped out all the DI code for the keyboard and replaced it with Windows WM_KEY{DOWN,UP} and WM_CHAR message handlers. Performance impact was zero, and I got keymatic, keymap, and internationalization support for free. I never looked at how DI handled the mouse, but I suspected it was just as badly botched.
</SAGA>

It's possible Microsoft has addressed these issues in the intervening 15+ years, but I strongly doubt it. So I'm only mildly surprised this problem exists. It's a common oversight.

Download http://www.highrez.co.uk/downloads/XMouseButtonControl.htm

Start the game, Alt-Tab to Windows and in X-Mouse Button Control add the game by clicking the Add button and selecting the game from the list.

Once the game is added and highlighted check the list on the right, for "Left Button" select "Right Click" then for "Right Button" select "Left Click".

Click Apply, go back to the game.

Then basically the left and right buttons should be switched as long as X-Mouse Button Control is running.



Edit....

I see the newer (current) version of X Mouse Button Control has an option called "Switch primary and secondary mouse buttons" on the "Scrolling and Navigation" tab, setting that to "Swap" should have the same effect.

In bottom panel of the UI, slightly right of the center, you can tell the game what attacks/skills/... to use on left/right mouse button. He/she will possibly have to use the secondary button to talk to folks and stuff, but the interesting part, when you're in the action, you can configure just like you want.