The Steam Controller Configurator's Untapped Power
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I use the Steam Link + Steam Controller to play games from my PC in my home office on my TV in my living room, a lot. I would say in the last year I've spent at least 80-100 hours using my Steam Controller in different situations and games.
It's hit or miss in many games, the best experience I've had with it is in Civilization. In some games it's _so_ close to perfect but the game disables mouse-input if you are using a controller, which means you can't use the Steam Controller to its full capability.
All in all, I mostly use my Xbox controllers (connected to my PC via the Microsoft adapter) to play on my Steam Link, mainly because the Steam Controller just feels cheap.
When they first talked about open sourcing all the designs for it I was hoping someone would take the specs and make a all-metal version of the controller, with some more heft.
I love the Steam controller, but it just feels so cheap so that when any growing-pains pains get in my way, it's one more negative against it compared to just using my other controllers.
I may be part of a small niche market but I would gladly pay $150-$250 for a good feeling controller that does exactly what the Steam Controller does. I think if I paid a bit more for it and it felt more premium, I'd be more invested in taking the time to configure it just right.
Yeah, the Valve team (and me, I'm the OP) are specifically pushing hard on this -- an emerging best practice is to always allow simultaneous mouse & gamepad input.
But if what you want is just exactly the Valve Steam Controller model with more heft, I guess we'll have to wait and see.
Specifically, I'm thinking of how Call of Duty Black Ops III gives controllers a whole bunch of aim assist so they don't get dunked on by people using mouse+keyboard. Guess what used to happen if you plugged in a controller and played with the mouse?
In an ideal world, the fix would be to not give half your players an aimbot, but you just know the product manager wouldn't go for that. Looks like they ended up adding a patch that tries to figure out whether you're actually using the controller.
https://www.reddit.com/r/blackops3/comments/44yfri/pc_aim_as...
Shooting someone in and FPS with a mouse is literally just clicking on something, do you need help clicking on icons?. It is not difficult until the target gets very small or is moving in a specific unfavorable way. Those are both situations where auto-aim tends to help less, like ignoring far targets or aiming at instead of ahead of moving targets. Then there are the times I have been lined up for a perfect headshot only to have the auto aim pull my gun of course and blast center mass giving the enemy precious seconds to respond with their rocket launcher or equally fatal weapon.
No, this is the ideal world. Mouse users have more manual accuracy, couch gamers can still have fun vs. mouse users. Combating fringe cases (how many people actually plug in a controller and a mouse at the same time..?) makes no sense. This 'divide' worked like a charm on Titanfall.
There are good reasons to have both, and no reason to unplug either of them except to work around a buggy game.
How many people actually unplug things when they, uh, don't need them for a second or two?
I leave my monitor plugged. I leave my power cord plugged. I leave my keyboard and mouse plugged. I leave my headphones plugged. I leave my hard drive plugged. I leave my ethernet cable plugged. Why should I not leave my controller plugged?
There's nothing more frustrating than running out of batteries in a controller and the game just locks you into mouse input... on a living room PC.
Not that anyone but speed runners actually would do this to themselves.
I've been spending some time lately making control layouts for old games (and using it as an excuse to replay the original Deus Ex), and while the configurator works really well, it still has some issues around getting users up-to-speed with their selected layouts (letting the profile adjust the "controller HUD" popups would probably go a long way towards this).
As in, being able to jump back and forth between controller and mouse, with all the visuals changing too. Hopefully it catches on more.
Running around with a joystick to suddenly see keyboard prompts pop up when I aim is a bad user experience, even if it is relating the truth.
I would like to see games detect the steam controller and default to using the controller visuals even when there is mouse (or keyboard) input.
My biggest complaint is finding games that I can scale the UI up enough to be comfortable viewing from 8-10 feet away. My eyes just can't read 12pt text at that distance...
I end up sitting on some cushions on the floor most of the time since I can't read the text from my couch.
I kept hitting the buttons on the back by accident, but I never tried using it on my computer or anything outside of the Xbox itself.
It felt really good in my hands though. I'm going to go try right now, thanks for the reminder!
I was hoping this Stream driver would solve that but apparently it's a hardware design (and a bad one IMO)
Another annoyance is there is no quick way to switch more than 2 configs. I would love to be able to set it up like the SC where you can map the config to a specific game so it is alway set correctly.
This makes it sound like it's not a hardware problem.
Also love the circular all-metal D-pad and thumb-stick extensions...and switches providing adjustable travel for the triggers...and the configuration toggle switch. It's a sweet piece of hardware.
I also miss being able to smash a stick to the limit and occasionally find myself using less confident swipes on the touchpad or my thumb slipping off.
Consider that you've probably been playing shooters for years with the joystick, it takes a lot of time to master an input scheme. I had over 10 years of dual analog experience, starting with Halo CE, and already after 6 months I'm far better with the SC than I was with the joysticks.
Way off-topic. I got round to setting up NVIDIA GameStream on the Pi (with Moonlight-embedded). What a pleasure. NVIDIA's work with being able to change game settings has paid off - my projector is 1024x768 and all games that I've tried automatically run at that resolution. Steam plays very nicely with GameStream, too (I just wish Valve would release a client for the Pi). This type of setup is definitely the future of couch gaming.
I was one of the first customers to get one and used it to play through Portal 2 (which was bundled with it) and really liked the experience. Playing a little bit Civ 5 in between was also good.
After that I sold it (even with a small profit) because it felt cheap but mostly because it lacked a rechargeable battery and headphone jack, both of which the Xbox One controller has (and every modern controller should have).
I would buy one if they shipped it with a rechargeable battery, headphone jack and a build quality comparable to the Xbox One controller (which is really gread imho) for around the same price.
I have a bunch of them, and the batteries drain slowly enough that I only need two extra AAs in the charger, even though I have probably a dozen devices using the batteries.
It is the same with phones. Glass or Machines Aluminium are supposedly "premium" despite that they easily scratch and break/bend/shatter, are heavy, make it difficult to implement core features like antennas, etc etc. I think "premium" just means "expensive", as in, "look at my conspicuous display of wealth, I can afford to spend money on materials for my phone which are entirely unsuitable when considered in any objective way". Give me some robust plastic any day.
This is how it is with the steam controller. Valve made the "mistake" of constructing a controller that is light and strong, from plastic. A handheld device being light is a GOOD thing. But everybody complains of it being "cheap" - perhaps they should have made it from machined aluminium or gorilla glass or something absurd like that.
That said, I have no clue whether the Steam controller exhibits some of these properties or not.
I would normally be totally okay with a controller "feeling cheap", and think of it as a positive (especially since it means the price isn't inflated for no good reason), it's just with the mixture of constant-growing-pains that makes me snap out of disbelief and say "why am I using this controller?" to myself a lot.
I in no way think Valve made a mistake making this controller, as I stated I use it a lot, I just think I personally would be more inclined to stick through the growing pains if I had paid more money and was more invested and knew that when I put in the time to configure it perfectly for a game it'd be a "premium" experience all around.
When it comes to a controller, or anything, that I myself just use inside my own apartment and no one else sees ever, I'm not talking about it feeling cheap as a way of not letting me demonstrate my wealth and purchasing power to the world.
The mouse joystick is not very sensitive to slight movements of my thumbs. Thus, its basically impossible for sniping. It is possible to configure the joystick like a normal gamepad joystick but then I require really low sensitivity to aim well.
I figure it would work better on other kinds of games. Probably my favorite feature of the controller is that u can make the controller aim the camera with movement. Thus moving the controller up moves the camera up :D.
I got a cheap wireless keyboard/touchpad combo that I leave plugged into the steam link so I can deal with those random scenarios where you need a mouse and/or keyboard to deal with menus, but so far that hasn't been often.
I think it does a pretty good job with what it has, and if they can get more people onboard to being steam link friendly I think over time it'll be a great experience, but for now it's more of a first generation type thing.
I don't regret my steam controller purchase though because it fulfills a useful niche: allowing me to play games that weren't designed for controller input from my couch. This is mostly because of their awesomely powerful configuration tool - they really thought of everything. The two touchpads on the controller and the ability to use the overlay for on-screen menus also increase flexibility when mapping controls for complex games.
This is mostly useful for older games in my experience, as newer games that would make sense with a controller generally already come with Xinput support.
I know exactly what you mean about feeling cheap and lacking heft, but it's usually about sheer weight, not materials or build quality. A lot of cheap, poorly-made products are lightweight because they shave material to save money, so our brains associate "lightweight" with "poor quality".
My Xbox controllers are on some weird Microsoft waveband that only works with Windows drivers, so I have to use a big extension cable connecting the adapter to my PC not the Steam Link.
If you are happy to spend $150 on a controller, I can deeply recommend the Xbox One Elite controller. I don't know anyone who isn't happy with theirs - the price is stupid, but the build quality is unrivaled, there's nothing like it on the market.
I forwarded this post to Apple.
I feel like I should give MS some credit for the Xbox One controller. It's a very high quality controller, IMO.
- It doesn't flex or make any creaking noises when you're squeezing it really hard (during extreme rage situations).
- The triggers have rubber bump stops. Believe it or not, this simple “feature” alone makes the controller feel much more premium to me. My aftermarket Xbox controller doesn’t have these and the triggers make a “cheap” plastic sound when you press them quickly. It’s almost like the entire controller is resonating at a high frequency.
- The joysticks are “tight” and precise. However, they do tend to accumulate some slop over time.
- It’s a comfortable shape overall.
This isn't very promising:
> Aside: my (personal!) hope is that the Steam Controller initiative will eventually become a new universal -- and open -- standard for PC gaming input. I'm definitely not speaking for Valve on this particular point as I have no idea what their long term plans are.
Tying hardware to a distributor is a nasty practice. While there is now a Steam-less driver for the controller[1], if developers will start using these new APIs, how is it supposed to work for games released through GOG for instance? Are Valve planning to release these APIs as FOSS and without tying them to Steam? I'd say developers should not fall for this lock-in, until it becomes truly open.
I have an old PS3 I've not used in years (stopped using anything Sony when they sued GeoHot). If the controllers for that work with Steam, it might be worth digging them out and putting them to use. :)
* Update: Doing some basic DDG searching shows that it should work. I might as well see if they still hold a charge. ;)
A few hiccups, but a very good controller.
If you're using Windows, ScpToolkit works really well ( https://github.com/nefarius/ScpToolkit ). There are also lots of scammy adware-ridden ps3 controller drivers which are easier to find on Google
You may have to launch the game through Steam on your PC, but not necessarily acquire it through the Steam distribution system.
edit: forgot the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamController/comments/53ftxp/sup...
I would think the only exception would be things that use HDCP protection, like maybe Netflix.
It's such utterly ridiculous bullshit.
The resolution and bitrate is burned in for each quality level they stream. I'm topping out at 3000kbps/720p in Chrome. I don't have a Windows machine to test on, though.
Similar story with Undertale (not in Steam). The Steam Overlay doesn't want to work with it, so I can't even launch it with Steam without it simply crashing. Instead I set up a "desktop" mode with like 5 sub-modes to handle various games that don't work when launched from Steam, and it works. Amazing.
Easily the most flexible input device I've ever used. I love it. It can take a while (far too long for many people, which is totally fair) to get it exactly the way I want it, but thus far it has always been possible.
(I use the Steam controller with out Steam)
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The absolute best part of xinput though is that all you have to do to configure it for fine-grained control is drop to the command line and figure out what magic numbers mean what: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config/Input#Example:_Disabling_mi...
Really, what could be easier? Tens of competing GUIs that almost never visually match the device I'm holding? Ha. CLI forever.
It's about these new APIs. If they'll be tied to Steam, and games will use them, then controller will be useless when those games will be distributed through GOG and other non Steam stores.
All you have to do is open the exe through steam by clicking "add non steam game".
So this is not true.
That is my hope as well, but for that to happen the configurator probably needs to become an independent application that's not tied to the Steam client.
I also love my Steam Controller. The software was a little and miss but less and less by the day. For example I had sometimes problems autoloading my configs, now I don't even have to play attention to it. It just works. My mind was blown when I configured the Steam controller to work as a Dolphin (Wii Emulator) controller: super accurate pointer controls through the trackpad. I mapped the motion controls to only work while holding the left hand pad; no more missed motions. I didn't like certain button mappings, so I switched them around: perfect. I wanted to use my PS3 controller instead and it worked out of the box with nearly the same config.
Endless possibilities for tinkering, but also (almost every time) works out of the box: just like good PC experience should be.
I also have a PS4 controller that completely stopped working because it fell four feet onto a carpet.
Given how many dead controllers I've seen without even any baby to blame, I'm not sure the Steam Controller necessarily that much worse.
Mind you, I don't regularly drop my controllers from 4ft (1.3m) either, so I can't comment on that.
I WANT to love my Steam Controller. I take it out weekly, try to configure stuff for Skyrim, or Civ, or even just Doom, and I fail.
It feels cheap. It's plasticy and cheap. Until there's a Steam "Elite" that doesn't feel like $10 of plastic, it's always gonna be Betamax - technically superior, but losing the core market.
I should be able to bind any button that sends a signal my computer can understand -- to any application, any action. It should not matter whether it's a keyboard button, a mose button, a mose thumb button, a joystick button, or my belly button... as long as a driver can detect the signal, the code to make arbitrary buttons bindable is trivial, yet people have just looked at the physical objects the buttons are placed on, and then draw an API for each object, with built in assumptions.
This is how we get mice that also report themselves as an USB keyboard, and half the thumb buttons do not work in most applications (becaues they're reported as mouse buttons by default and handling more than 3 or 5 mouse buttons seems to require higher intelligence) and, well, the other half overlap with keyboard keys I'd prefer to use for different functions.
It's nice that someone's working on this but I feel like this steam configurator is yet another proprietary layer, a hack on top of hacks, and so people just lazily depend on it.
Your argument is a bit like saying it's stupid we have all these Graphics API's, it should be unified a long time ago since all they do is set pixels on a monitor to a certain color.
Yes, I focused on buttons only, because that is the lowest bar (and we've yet to cross that).
Yes, I am fully aware that there are other kinds of inputs. We've had "analog" inputs for decades. Sliders, joysticks, sensors, etcetra. There is nothing difficult about them. All we need is a driver to understand the inputs, optionally identify them with a name, symbol, intended purpose or default function and other metadata, and export through an API that allows applications to easily map things to arbitrary inputs. And allow the user to filter inputs at a lower level; for example, if he finds that input device 6 has a nice input 17 that takes values in the range [0 to 255] that he'd like to treat as a binary input that reads high in [0 to 126] range and otherwise low, that should again be possible and very easy to do as long as the underlying API is sane.
Rumble and force feedback, keyboard leds, gpios in output mode, etc. are outputs, which could be exposed through a similar, arbitrarily mappable mechanism.
We've had all these for decades, and we've yet to cross the lowest bar of making all simple buttons bindable everywhere through a uniform API.
It is not hard, nobody just wants to do it (at a low level, USB HID comes surprisingly close! But then it has its struggles, what with the default keyboard mode that requires a bitfield for modifiers and bytes for other scancodes), and in the name of compatibility, we just keep piling hacks on top of legacy. And my mouse's thumb buttons are still useless most of the time.
The thing that's missing is that manufacturers and developers just aren't on the same page here - the protocols exist, and with pretty good software support, even(there's a Web MIDI, and MIDI for phones in various forms). The major modes of incompatibility - e.g. velocity ranges that are biased and need remapping, unconventional behaviors around SysEx messages - are well-known. It's just a little bit unaesthetic that a game controller would send a "Note On" to press a button when it isn't doing anything with notes, really. And it doesn't map to the tradition of arcade hardware being a simple memory-mapping of button state, but I doubt most game controllers now are doing that internally.
Regardless, game controllers don't send MIDI messages by default. And yeah, MIDI is old, and has a few hard design limits, and one could make a case for looking at another standard like Open Sound Control. But the basic problem of button mapping has been more than solved for a long time, so count me as one who is irritated at the idea that games are special here.
Yeah, I was actually thinking of MIDI (and USB) when I wrote the above (I have a full size midi master keyboard next to my deskop). At a certain level, we have pretty much all we need, and if the limitations of MIDI were a problem for some input devices (and they arguably are), it'd still be quite easy to spec a system that allows just about any device imaginable. Again, USB HID spec comes really close.
The real problem is just the lack of good, widespread, cross-platform APIs that steer applications into doing the right thing. Now we have APIs that encourage the application to look for keyboard events, then mouse events, then joystick events, and what else (and they implementations may lack support for other devices even if the underlying OS-level API made support a no-brainer).
Instead, they should just look for events, any events that have an applicable type. (Whether implemented through callbacks or polling the state of interesting inputs is merely an implementation detail) Then the (optional) metadata can be used for establishing a default mapping. When the API is designed right, the user can always override any mapping with whatever he wants, or filter inputs to change the response of an analogue device, perhaps nonlinearizing it or coercing it to a binary input. And if the application provides its built-in input configurator, again using the well-designed API, the ability to bind anything to anything on anything just comes automatically. The application developer should never need to know that device 7 input 2 is actually wired to my belly button. :) And that the axes I use for aiming are actually sliders on my MIDI keyboard.
I was bummed on the controller, till I saw you could aim by moving the entire controller around like an air mouse. That ended up being a fresh control scheme for me, though I know the PS4 controller can do it for on-screen keyboard use.
Would love to see some revised shapes to it. I really dig how it can move the mouse when the software is on even on the desktop. If you don't midn keeping steam running it's a fairly capable to surf with. Though admittedly I haven't done everything.
It took a long time for it to come out. I wonder if they are working on a new generation in secret because they know they might not sell as many right now.
I think it feels premium, but the shape is not ergonomic to me whatsoever.
There should be some companion AI app to speed out process of setting this up. ;)
If you think that's bad, try using their map editor[0].
[0]https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Hammer_Editor
I was hoping that purchasing a Steam Controller would let me play some of the games that were clearly controller-based like Rocket League, or other action-type games not particularly well-suited for keyboard and mouse.
The controller feels plasticky, poorly balanced, and fragile. Give it a gentle shake and you can actually hear the buttons moving around.
Every single game I wanted to play required configuration of some sort or simply didn't work. I even bought games like Rocket League specifically to make use of the controller.
Instead of just working. I had to unplug the USB dongle a couple of times, setup some manual configuration, only to have it still not work, have to be blown all away and reset back to default. It eventually worked... until the next time I went to play and sure as hell: I had to restart Steam a couple times, re-plug in the USB dongle a few times, and eventually the controller was properly identified and working.
The sheer number of incorrect options available for this thing make it useless. Should it emulate keyboard? Is it a gamepad? Joystick? Mouse and gamepad? Mouse and joystick?
I lamented my purchase and wished I would've bought a more standard controller like an Xbox controller or a PlayStation controller as this was a nightmare.
The article appears to be heading down the right track, with trying to get developers on board with mapping actions instead of buttons, but I simply don't have the time to tinker with something like a controller. When I want to play a video game, I want to sit and play a video game.
I spoked to some of my game development friends about it and every one of them said that controller and device support was among one of the most mind-numbingly frustrating and difficult parts of cross-platform development.
The last time I tried the Steam Controller, I fired it up and none of it worked. I could see the controller was detected, but nothing worked. The mouse pad, buttons, controls, nothing. This had happened so many times before. I installed the beta version of Steam, browsed forums for fixes, and everything.
I tried very hard to like this peripheral but it was a complete failure. I'm very hesitant to try even more configuration options considering how much time I sunk into it last time. I literally gave up on having a controller-based gaming experience with my computer, got a PS4 for the holidays, and haven't looked back.
I still play games on my computer, but I gave up on the dream of having a nice controller-based gaming experience on my computer.
There were enough forum posts around with folks having similar issues, that I guess I just assumed you had to be willing to spend time tinkering a lot if you wanted it to work, and thought contacting support would end up being an even larger time sink.
Those are just a couple of examples. Attempting other games would end up with incorrect mappings, incorrect button listings, not working, and more.
Very inconsistent and unreliable.
I don't have a tremendous amount of time for games at the moment. Certainly not enough that I want to be tinkering with, or resetting things, when I'm ready to play.
I received a PS4 for the holidays and it's consistently delivered the experience I was hoping to find so I haven't revisited attempting a controller on the computer.