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Comment by fbrchps | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately I can't find a direct reference on any Valve official channels, but I'd say that typing on a Steam Controller is quite good; I'd even go so far to say that it's going to be hard to beat it for keyboard input on a controller.

Anecdotally, most people hated the Steam Controller's touchpads, and I'll admit I wasn't a fan at first either. But the ability to remap them to be: sticks, trackballs, d-pads, bring up (multi-level) radial menus, etc. is an absolutely killer feature.

I think one of the reasons they "failed" is because they absolutely were not plug-and-play, because to truly utilize their full capabilities, you had to configure them per game.

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As someone who actually enjoys tinkering with these settings. I grew to love the controllers quite quickly. But it's exactly as you said.

Steam Controllers are not plug-and-play. They're really a niche thing.

I was able to set up a reasonable competetive setup for Metal Gear Online. I had the left pad for walking. Then set up the right one with extremely sensitive camera control, so I could turn around really quickly. But configured it in such a way that it slowed down a bit when I pressed down the aim button. After which I also enabled gyro controls for fine-aiming.

For Fallout 4 it was a more casual layout. But here I made the right trigger hipfire if you fully pressed it immediately. But a half-press would go into iron-sights first, while also enabling gyro aiming. This felt really intuitive for me.

>Steam Controllers are not plug-and-play

I gotta say, for old games I had already played it was a great experience since I knew what I wanted to configure and how. However, new games were a pain since I was still trying to figure everything out

Valve created an implementation of the keyboard experiment we see here (a keyboard with letters accessed with direction + face button[0]), but actually scrapped it when they released the Steam Controller (the Big Picture keyboard is now a split keyboard, where each stick/touchpad controls one side of the split[1]).

[0]: http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17ynanc1qocy1jpg/original.jp...

[1]: https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2015/10/my-great-...

I have a htc vive which uses the same trackpads and I think radial menus on them work so well.

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