SteamOS. Steam Controller. Steam Machines. First Steam controller delivered to Xeno!

OldSoulCyborg wrote:
Lagamorph wrote:Definitely going to take a long time to get used to the right analogue stick being replaced by the touchpad for third person games. Was having major difficulty trying to play Arkham Knight with it. Think I need to whack the sensitivity up at the very least.

You're emulating an analog stick with the right touchpad? If the game supports gamepad and mouse simultaneously then I suggest using it as a mouse instead (assuming the game has the mouse control the camera).
That way you get analog movement and the right trackpad is in its best, most natural mode.

I'm just guessing here as I've never played a 3rd person action game with the controller, but that seems like the best way to do it.

It is set to mouse mode, it's just awkward to use it instead of an analogue stick is what I mean.

I much prefer using the right trackpad as a mouse in the Arkham games and Disney Infinity. I'll be a very happy gamer if I never again have to use dual analogs.

Lagamorph wrote:
OldSoulCyborg wrote:
Lagamorph wrote:Definitely going to take a long time to get used to the right analogue stick being replaced by the touchpad for third person games. Was having major difficulty trying to play Arkham Knight with it. Think I need to whack the sensitivity up at the very least.

You're emulating an analog stick with the right touchpad? If the game supports gamepad and mouse simultaneously then I suggest using it as a mouse instead (assuming the game has the mouse control the camera).
That way you get analog movement and the right trackpad is in its best, most natural mode.

I'm just guessing here as I've never played a 3rd person action game with the controller, but that seems like the best way to do it.

It is set to mouse mode, it's just awkward to use it instead of an analogue stick is what I mean.

Ah, I see. Try changing it to an analog stick instead? You would need the haptics turned up for it to work optimally though, to get a better feel for where your thumb is on the pad... try it anyway, maybe the haptics aren't as vital as I think they are.

Super Dragon 64 wrote:I much prefer using the right trackpad as a mouse in the Arkham games and Disney Infinity. I'll be a very happy gamer if I never again have to use dual analogs.

I don't suppose you could post up a screenshot of your right trackpad configuration could you? Or have you just left it at default?

I'll take some screenshots when I'm playing next and then post them. I just use the default settings and then increase the sensitivity until it's responsive enough.

First up are my Arkham City configurations. I remapped the controls so that their positions more or less mimic the 360 controls but I tweaked it so that the attack buttons are on the paddels. Now that I look at it, I forgot to map the middle mouse button for stun :oops:

I could probably put that where Z is (i.e. click the right trackpad) and move Z to one of the diamond buttons or the analog stick.

Controlling the camera with the right trackpad feels about the same as using a mouse, in terms of speed. I was able to adjust to it without much effort as I played through the whole of Origins with the keyboard and mouse and that was my plan for Knight until I got the Steam Controller.

The gadgets have been mapped to the diamond buttons and a direction on the analog stick. I just went through them in ascending order but it would be better to configure them so that ones that only ones that aren't used in combat (like the zip line) are on the analog stick. The left bumbper is used as a modifier so that I can use ABXY to control 8 different gadgets.

Infinity 3.0 is probably just an edited version of the gamepad + high precision aim binding from the set of three that you're offered when loading a game without a preset portfolio. I increased the sensitivity of the mouse on the right trackpad, and probably the game, until I was happy with its speed. Putting attack and block on the paddels, like Arkham, makes combat a joy as I'm not moving my thumb between buttons and the camera controls as much. I just wish that I had two more paddels for jump and the Force.

The Steam Controller is unquestionably the best controller that I've ever used in terms of functionality, and probably even comfort. I haven't tried the gyro controls yet but I'm looking forward to them as they work really well in Splatoon. You definitely have to spend some time tweaking the controls, for nearly every game, unless you find a community profile that you like but the result is well worth the effort.

So Ive spent a couple of days with the controller now and I have to say I like it. I still find myself hitting the wrong button from time to time, Im used to either holding a 360 controller or a Nintendo controller so I think my brain is registering that its not a 360 controller and going into Nintendo mode and swapping the inputs. I know I can reconfigure it but Im trying to use the defaults for now while I get to grips with it. I dont think it will take too much longer before it clicks and I can dig into the configs and try out some different schemes. I also love that I can use it as a mouse in windows, I was very skeptical of that but it works surprisingly well, I can see myself really falling in love with this thing.

I still can't get the right touchpad to be as good as an analogue stick in third person games. Everytime I play an Arkham game I'm getting tempted to switch back to my 360 controller because I just can't seem to have as smooth control of the camera with the Steam one, even with sensitivity almost all the way up at maximum.
Haven't tried it with an FPS yet.

You might be treating it as a touchpad instead of an analogue stick? I had a similar problem, I was sliding my thumb across it to get the camera to move when all i had to do was put my thumb where i would move the stick to. It worked better when I got used to that. Might not solve your problem but worth mentioning.

I think i tried that and it didn't seem to register at all when I just touched the edge of the pad.
Will give it a try again though at the weekend.

I did turn off some trackball setting as well. Would it be better leaving that on?

I never need to put my sensitivity that high. ~~Is trackball mode even turned on?~~ I'd suggest turning it on. It might take some time to get used to it though. Play around with the friction, sensitivity and even acceleration (usually poison with a mouse, but I've found it can be helpful on the Steam Controller).
You could also turn on edge spin in regular trackpad mode, then when your thumb is at the edge the controller will send a constant mouse input in that direction.
How high is the mouse sensitivity set in-game?

Lagamorph wrote:I think i tried that and it didn't seem to register at all when I just touched the edge of the pad.

There's a big difference between Joystick Move and Joystick Camera. With the Camera mode wherever you put your thumb down, that's where the center of the stick is (until you lift your thumb off and put it down somewhere else, then that's the center). It's Joystick Move that works like what Rax was talking about.

For some reason I own Arkham Asylum on Steam. No idea how or when that happened. I was so turned away by the demo when I first played it, just didn't like it at all. I must say, though, it's much better than the demo led me to believe.

Anyway, I booted it up and tried my hand at making a configuration. The game does not support simultaneous gamepad and mouse (buttons are fine, but analog movement and camera control on the mouse isn't doable) which means I either had to control the camera with an analog stick on the right pad, or settle for not having analog movement. I tried both and ended up with WASD mapped to the analog stick and mouse on the right trackpad. The simulated analog stick for camera control was fine, but I much preferred the mouse. More comfortable to me and way faster (it's not really a game that requires fast camera control, but it's really fun whipping the camera around in the trackball setting).

I have no idea how similar Asylum is to Knight, but I thought I'd share my setup. I'm pretty happy with it so far, but I've only just started and maybe as the game progresses I might need easier access to some of these bindings.

Does anyone know what peripherals work with the steam link? is it just mouse, keyboard and controllers or will joysticks and Track IR stuff work?

Spent the evening streaming various games from my desktop PC to my laptop connected to the living room TV. Had some issues with the game rendering out at 24fps for some reason. Don't have a convenient fix for it yet, but if I only plug in the HDMI cable after I've started the game it runs fine at 60fps. Not exactly optimal, but I'm hoping it's something to do with my laptop and that using Steam Link will be different.

Other than that it was pretty good. There was noticable latency, especially in stuff like Trials, but on the whole it worked well enough.

Changed the settings on the controller so that the right pad is in Joystick camera mode rather than mouse mode. Unfortunately I still find it nowhere near as good as an analogue stick for camera control when playing Arkham Knight

I also still don't get any response if I just touch the edge of the pad. The only way I get any response at all is if I start my thumb out in the middle and drag/swipe across, more or less exactly the same as mouse mode.

Lagamorph wrote:I also still don't get any response if I just touch the edge of the pad. The only way I get any response at all is if I start my thumb out in the middle and drag/swipe across, more or less exactly the same as mouse mode.

You'll want to set the touchpad to joystick move, not camera.
Did you try turning trackball mode on again? I suggest you try that and set vertical friction really high. Setting friction vertical scale high will stop the "ball" rolling vertically much quicker than horizontally, which feels way better for 3rd person games like Batman.
Edit: Actually, the description for friction vertical scale is wrong. To get the rolling to stop quicker vertically you have to set it below the half-way point.

Moving this Steam Link discussion out of the PCGT and here, where it makes more sense.

jiggles wrote:I was planning on replacing my 200Mbps AVs with 1200Mbps AV2s anyway to keep up with my multimedia demands, but I wasn't going to do it until the start of next year. I guess I'll bring it forward to see if it makes this a viable product.

So, I've gone and replaced my entire home networking setup. I'm now running a set of 1200Mbps homeplugs and gigabit cables that are giving me about 750Mbps real-world bandwidth, which is pretty strawberry floating great. Yet still Steam Link defies me. After hours of reboots, driver reinstalls, settings changes and running up and down the stairs between the PC and Steam Link, I've concluded that there are two major issues with Hardware Encoding right now in Steam:

1. It breaks if I quit a game and try to go to another. There are a bunch of NVIDIA services that never go away unless I open Task Manager and kill them. When I try to boot a second game, it sees the H.264 encoding chip in the GPU as already busy, so it uses the software encoder.
2. The hardware encoder is capped to 30Mbps by Steam.

Now, my machine is a beast, so the software encoder can keep up with a 1080p/60fps stream most of the time. Even in CPU-intensive games like Fallout 4 it'll only rarely dip to 30fps. And because it's free to use as much bandwidth as it can it looks seriously good. Like, almost indistinguishable from native output. But, because it's not running on dedicated hardware, there are issues. Audio popping is rampant, and every so often, when the CPU needs a little juice for some other service on the machine, there'll be a momentary pause that can last anywhere between 1 and 3 seconds. Which has been enough to miss a line of dialogue or QTE prompt in Tales from the Borderlands, and has caused me to die once in Fallout 4. Now, this happens probably once every 25 minutes of play, but that it happens at all is too often. So software encoding is an ok stopgap, but not good enough to be a permanent solution.

With hardware encoding on, that issue's completely gone, and everything runs great, but the 30Mbps cap makes it look shite. Some Valve guy in their forums has said it's a bug in how Steam detects available bandwidth from Nvidia's chips, so hopefully they can get it fixed quick. But you really have to wonder what conditions this was tested under internally for them for it to have such a glaring issue.

Works on my machine.

The Nvidia hardware encoder really works without a 30Mbps bandwidth cap or you're just shitposting?

jiggles wrote:The Nvidia hardware encoder really works without a 30Mbps bandwidth cap or you're just shitposting?

I was making a joke about testing conditions for tech. Jeff Atwood's joke certification program for software developers. https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-works ... n-program/

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