Oh shit, sorry.
The prices are crazy.
I’m really considering buying one of these at some point. Alternate should be interesting for me (in Belgium), low shipping prices etc.
If I do get to that point, I’ll definitely compile a custom system to compare prices first, but at the moment it looks really good, convenient yet flexible.
I delayed buying a PS4 with my end of year bonus to see what these would be like.
There’s still months to go before the damn thing will release, of course it isn’t quite finished yet.
But to that extent?
The iris pro, while not on par with a GTX 600 or 700 series, is a pretty powerful Integrated GPU.
Watching a lot of the newly released steam controller hands on footage, and I’m getting really really annoyed that the controller is a dark blue instead of black. PLEASE change that for the final version, the off-black just looks so weird and ugly next to mountains of black hardware.
Or make it customizable, with an outer shell that you can take out easily and swap for others.
Or, take the new bent oled displays from CES and lay them around the controller. Sell custom skins in the market place.
I’m a little confused on something, is the haptic feedback ONLY going to be used for input emulation, or are devs (including Valve with their first party games) planning on implementing rumble style game feedback? It seems like the latter would be really nice, and a waste to leave out.
You could even give the player a sense of disorientation when hit by an explosion by causing a rumble effect that slightly overpowers the standard haptic feedback. Or, in a scene where the character is passing out, the clicking haptic feedback would get lighter so it’d actually feel like to the player that his senses were getting dimmer. As Valve says, it’s a huge channel for information, that presents the opportunity to both add and take away information from the player in an immersive experience. I hope developers take advantage of this.
EDIT: also, what happens if you like play the same game with the controller and with the KB+M depending on what kind of mood you’re in. What happens if your keyboard and mouse bindings are custom? Since the controller is just outputting signals disguised as keyboard and mouse inputs, it sounds like the entire bindings system would get REALLY confusing and none of the controller bindings would work without messing around with them. This whole ultra versatility thing is really cool that they’re doing, but I really hope, at least for some major games/non legacy mode games, the system is A LOT more streamlined than what we’re seeing. It’d be really cool if, for games with workshop support, the community went in and coded built in support for the steam controller with the right on screen prompts and everything. I don’t think they’ve shown any non-legacy controller support yet, I’m really hoping it’s cleaning done, and that the SDK for it will be easy for the modding community to put into older games without official support. Also wondering if there’s going to be a “lefty” feature that automatically reverses all the keybindings for you. I’m sure the community keybindings will do that, it’d just be nice and easy to see an auto feature for it (not even a lefty, just thinking about it).
https://www.shacknews.com/article/82661/steam-controller-drops-touch-screen-adds-physical-buttons
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1vayq5/the_nicest_take_home_from_a_conference_ever_a/
SteamOS installer adds dual-boot support:
https://www.shacknews.com/article/82774/steamos-beta-now-allows-dual-boot
Time to resurrect this poor neglected thread.
I got to go to GDC and check out Valve’s booth and got my hands on the latest controller. IT felt pretty good to hold.
The face buttons and d-pad aren’t hard to reach, but they press way too softly for my liking. I asked one of the Valve devs if they were thinking of using mechanical switches for the face buttons, and he said the last version did, and people thought the buttons felt cheap, so they put in silicon membrane switches instead. Makes me sad.
The triggers are analog, but with mechanical switches too, so it can act as analog input or digital input , or both simultaneously, on the software end. The accentuation force was at the very end of the trigger’s depression so it doesn’t move very far after the click. I would have liked to see the accentuation force a little further out.
Seen a lot of articles on the internet saying the touchpads felt way too twitchy and sensitivite. They definitely weren’t as nice to use as a mouse, but I would say it’s still a lot better than using two analog sticks.
Asked a couple other questions of the devs there:
So far no games are implementing the haptic of the touchpads to pass through information such as explosions in the way a standard controller’s rumble does. I asked him about implementing that in first party games, he made it sound like they really weren’t interested in doing so, but that if they decided they wanted to they would and could. It’s a little dissapointing, I’m not sure why he seemed completely disinterested in implementing a feature that is considered standard in all other controllers. Perhaps they aren’t using it because it’d mess with the haptic feedback used to emulate physicality, but the tone I got from him seemed to be that they just really didn’t consider it a worthwhile feature.
Portal 2 has native support now as opposed to legacy support, so the left touchpad is actually implementing analog movement as opposed to emulating WASD key presses. Didn’t seem very noticeable or practical in game when I tested it out. The final wireless version will be using a proprietary wireless stack and a USB dongle. The current wired version is using mini USB as opposed to Micro (bizarrely enough the dev I asked this one didn’t even seem certain of she answer, so maybe it isn’t mini USB). All this is also very disappointing. I asked why they weren’t using bluetooth, but she didn’t seem to know very much and couldn’t answer.
You will be able to change whether or not the controller is emulating an analog stick or a trackball from the steam overlay. This also works in legacy mode, so you could say, set the right touchpad to register as a trackball to the computer, and the left toucpad to register as a standard controller’s analog stick. This way, if a game without native support steam controller supports analog input via a standard controller, you can still get analog movement out of the steam controller in legacy mode. Pretty cool.
Tbh, it sounds just like me when I’m trying to play an FPS with a PS controller. Seems to me like it’s just a matter of getting used to it, and this guy doesn’t see that because he regards himself as experienced with console controllers.
I don’t get how people don’t understand that something like this being good is going to come down to a shit load of fine tuning and that they’re still developing it and the complaints people have with it are finding the sweet spots for the thing. A controller like this has no previous versions to compare. Saying it feels way to sensitive is important feedback to making it feel right. I’ve used plenty of controllers and joysticks that felt and played like shit too but it doesn’t make me leery of the whole concept of controllers and joysticks.
I talked to some touchpad devs near Valve’s booth who were showing of a super low latency touch surface. I asked them if they were talking with Valve about getting their tech in the steam controller. He said “Yeah we’ve talked to them about it and we’re interested and they seemed interested, but the stuff they got in there is terrible one dollar stuff, and our stuff is like five dollars so I’m not sure it’s going to happen.”
A lot of my earlier post was right after reading the PCgamer article. Having used the controller myself, I feel like Bur’s interpretation is spot on.