Azih said:

Any word on availability?

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ashecitism said:

Also, can you please post a link to the thread/posts over at Sonic Retro so I can properly put them in the OP of the beta impression thread?

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Internally, the buttons are referred to in the steam controller API as "A,B,X,Y" and "1, 2, 3, 4" just as they always have been. Those 4 buttons are the old buttons that represented quadrants in the old proto

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MaximoffZero said:

Would like to know this as well. I'm holding out on getting any new controllers for PC until I see how this thing does.

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Candescence said:

*Dropin' Knowledge*

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Dario ff said:

The thread's on a non-public section of the board (members only), so that will be useless I'm afraid.

Another interesting point mentioned in the thread is that in the API internally, the directional buttons are still referred as 1-2-3-4 ("Touchscreen" buttons), which kinda confirms the re-arrangement I proposed before.

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ashecitism said:

I wonder, could those buttons still be used for 8-way input? I mean for compatibility's sake, as it was established in this thread, in lots of other games (like the Arkham games) use the d-pad is a gadget selector. Now let's say people used to the X360 layout would want to use that diamond for that, could it be possible with them or is it something "ghosting" can take care of (which I'm not sure is in legacy mode. Can't recall this from the talk)?

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Azih said:

Of course the other part of innovation is that none of us know whether it works or not until it's actually out in the wild. And with the wide variety of genres out there it's only when we have it in our hands that we can start judging what this design is good for and not good for.

Starcraft? Street Fighter? TitanFall? Super Meat Boy? which games will this excel at, which will ones will it be just alright in, and which ones will it suck for? Nooobody knows.

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Sulik2 said:

The buttons and losing the touch screen really help this controller. I am still concerned by those trackpads. I still think a left analog and a right trackball would have been a better solution than trackpads, but I need to get one in my hands to judge.

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TheSonicRetard @ Sonic Retro said:

Jeffery Mewtamer @ Sonic Retro said:

Okay, so the track pads do an excellent job of emulating a trackball(making them decent to good mouse replacements) and rocker-style d-pads. How well do they emulate an analog stick or the classic 4-button diamond? If they do both of those things well, combined with anything they can do that more traditional controller bits can't, I say the dual track pads positioned at the thumbs' natural resting position sounds like a great step forward in controller design. You have all of the major thumb controls in one, can shift to the pair of thumb controls most relevant to the game or even on the fly, and you minimize the need to move the thumb to a secondary thumb control. Not to mention that you can swap direction controls and action buttons without needed a non-standard controller.

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well, by virtue of the touchpads knowing where your finger is on the dish itself, it can approximate an analog value from the center. Meaning the controller knows how far away from the pivot you're pressing down. In that regard, it can operate like an analog input, but it certainly doesn't feel like an analog stick. It's hard to explain what it feels like since it's not pressure sensitive either. It's really unlike any analog controller I've worked before. If you notice, the touchpad is separated into 3 rings by ridges - these "zones" can be defined within their legacy controller mapping software to correspond to different values. So like, the inner ring might be walking speed, where the outter ring is running speed. You can do things like assign modifiers to different zones to simulate analog movement from keyboard presses too - doing stuff like making shift be held when you press on the outter ring so that you'll be running in most PC games.

As for simulating a 4-button diamond... it could do that, I guess, the same way it can imitate a d-pad. but it's not very optimal to work like that, because you don't feel the shape and feel of each button as I explained before. It's possible, but I don't think many people will choose to have it work like that. With Sonic all-stars racing transformed, for example, I don't map anything to the touch portion of the right pad, and instead just use it like a single, huge button (think the gamecube controller and it's A button) and rely on the shoulder/trigger/paddle buttons on the back.

Something I guess I forgot to go into detail about in my last post is that there are two modes for the controller - legacy mode, which has the controller acting like a gamepad/keyboard/mouse, and this is the mode everyone has tried and talks about. In this mode, the point is to make those touchpads act like conventional controllers, which it does to varying degrees of success. The other mode, that people don't talk about as much (because there is no commercial app that fully explores it yet) is native mode. In this mode, the controller is a blank slate, and you program your game to use the controller any way you want. This is a much more involved control pad than a traditional controller, in that it can operate in ways unlike any other controller before it. I've said several times in this thread that I've done tests with HL2VR using the steam controller trying out different input methods. My favorite method I've put together so far is a mix of classic doom-style mouse-walking controls and a push-to-activate d-pad. That is to say, when you touch the left pad (but don't press the buttons) then your touch is interpretated as relative input. Meaning, when I put my thumb on the touchpad, that becomes an origin, and when I swipe my thumb across the pad left, I move left X number of small steps, where X is the number of "clicks" my thumb has moved (clicks being the term people are using to describe the sensation of the haptic feedback to gauge input - when you "spin" the touchpad, you hear/feel clicks as it moves, not unlike the center wheel on a mouse). That sounds confusing if you haven't held the controller, but it's intuitive. That sort of control is used for walking speed -- using the touchpad as a d-pad as I described in my previous post makes you run in the cardinal/diagonal direction you press.

It's a control scheme unlike any other I've used and it feels really good. In the heat of battle, you find yourself able to make very fine corrections to your position, while normal walking feels like any other d-pad. I've relayed my experiments with other developers on the steamOS dev boards and sent my suggestions to valve in the last survey. I've heard of other people coming up with similarly radical controller implimentations in native mode - I heard one guy who was using each touch pad as a left/right foot control, where you slide your thumbs down to take steps, each slide down representing X amount of distance traveled where X is the number of clicks passed. Stuff like that.

I really don't think people will get this controller until they hold it in their hands, and until enough people have developed with it to figure out what works and what doesn't.

As for the arrow buttons, if the track pads emulate a d-pad as well as described, if your using the arrow buttons, the trackpad is probably being used as an analog stick replacement and the game is using the arrow buttons for something that doesn't require a proper d-pad.

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correct, that's indeed how it's meant to work.

Still, it sounds like Valve's dual track-pad design might end up being far more versatile than the dual analog design that has been the standard for the last decade and a half.

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It's pretty versatile given the amount of freedom you have to make it work in a variety of ways. The use of each pad might vary greatly from game to game. For aiming, it's vastly superior to an analog stick due to the fundamental ways they work (analog sticks control the acceleration of a camera's movement, the touchpads set a position for the cameras to actually reside at) and really approaches the usability of a mouse. To give an example of how different and empowering the controller is, I played DOTA2 the other day with it. DOTA, with a gamepad, from my couch. I wasn't awesome or anything, of course, but it was fully playable. Such a game isn't really playable at all with a conventional gamepad unless you want to get destroyed. And this is an actiony-genre that console gamers would like, not something like Civ as often cited.

Candescence @ Sonic Retro said:

Sounds great, Cooljerk. The way the haptic feedback works sounds pretty awesome, actually, the idea of feeling like you're rolling a trackball or rocking a pad in any direction makes me grin. I REALLY want to try out the controller at some point.

I look at the thread over at NeoGAF, and I see more than a few people either confused by the design of the 'd-pad' or saying "why isn't this a traditional controller, this is dumb" without even thinking that, perhaps, that's what the 360 pad is for. Valve making the same damn thing would be redundant. Innovation sometimes requires throwing out aspects that some people would consider essential to the thing you're working on, in order to see if you can't replace it with something better. Valve making a dual-stick controller would be pointless. Working out the kinks is what the beta is for, but the 'traditional' front button layout and shoulder buttons are about the only traditional thing Valve are gonna be doing with the controller, everything else, they're trying something new, and I applaud them for it. The dualshock design should not be the be-all and end-all of controller design.

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I don't really like the word innovation because, these days, it has certain connotations. People describe innovation as inherently superior, a novel way of doing stuff that automatically assumes improvement. Hence why you'll see the opposite sentiment being thrown about as "innovation for the sake of innovation." It feels like a marketing term at this point.

I don't think valve necessarily sees themselves innovating. I think they see their controller more as refinement and redesign. It's a controller with two goals in mind - one, to take keyboard and mice and refit them in a way such that they work on a gamepad as smoothly and seemlessly as possible, and two, to build a new style of controller that offers more methods of input than a traditional controller with greater fidelity. A lot of the requests people make about changing the left pad to an analog stick or whatever stems from their desire to make legacy mode feel better, without taking into account what those sorts of changes would do to native mode. Going forward, valve wants games made with native mode in mind, so the faults this has in legacy mode aren't necessarily driving the design.

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TheSonicRetard @ Sonic Retro said:

Writer from wired repeating a lot of what I said in my last big posts:

Just tried out the new version of the Steam Controller, many of which are at Valve's booth on the show floor.

It's still a prototype model that is mostly 3-D printed. But the basic functions are in place - the touchscreen has been swapped out for two diamond shaped arrays of buttons. I played Strider - streaming via a wired connection from a Windows PC to a Steam Machine - and it felt fine.

The buttons are a little on the small side and not quite as good as the larger, more conveniently placed buttons on an Xbox pad (e.g.), but they get the job done.

Don't worry that the Steam Controller doesn't have a D-pad. The main touch pad does a fine job of that. If you dislike the sensitivity you can always turn that off because the touchpads also have a “click” at each of the directions, and that works fine for directional control (a Valve rep told me that is how the Super Meat Boy team plays their game)

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http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2014/03/gdc-day-2/#refresh

what they're describing in that last sentence is what I described when I said you had to physically press the touchpad down to activate input. They even cited the same source I did

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coldfoot said:

You don't play with 2 mice, so swapping the left pad for an analog stick would be better, you'll still have the right trackpad for "mouse"

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