Comment on The Steam controller was ahead of its time

EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It has two trackpads, which can be used as an alternative to joysticks. It’s actually kinda cool since it kind of works like a mouse with quick flicks and whatnot.

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  • AlfredoJohn@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Eh I am not a big fan of the track pads, I have them on my deck and the only real useful ness for them is having them emulate a mouse in games so I can use a mouse for ui navigation instead of the joysticks or dpad. Having to constantly readjust my thumbs to keep moving in a direction and lack of ability for smooth continuos motion just makes them super impractical

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    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I don’t like them either, but that’s because I prefer the feel of joysticks, not because of any functional reason. For the Steam Controller trackpads, you don’t need to readjust anything, you just hold in the direction you want the camera to be changing, just like a joystick, and they’re massive so you have a lot of range of motion for controlling speed.

      It’s a different feel than on the Steam Deck, so I can totally see someone liking the SC trackpads and not the SD ones.

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      • AlfredoJohn@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Ah that makes sense, I’ve never tried the SC so I just assumed they worked in a similar manner to the decks track pads. I think I would still probably prefer joysticks but now I can see the appeal for some regarding how the SC track pads work.

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  • EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That’s sounds truly awful lol

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    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Some people really like it, especially combined w/ the gyro. I think it’s fine, I just prefer the feel of joysticks.

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• Sabata11792@ani.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I have one somewhere. The right track pad can work like a joystick, but without the physicality and feedback it just was awkward and unpleasant. Using tracking as a mouse also felt off whenever you needed any sort of precision. Right track pad/dpad seemed to be impossible to click just right to press a direction without also activating the trackpad mappings sending both inputs at once or the wrong one. I could not really get use to it and forgot about it in a box somewhere.

  Didn’t hate it, just couldn’t find a use that mouse and keyboard couldn’t cover enough to get a feel for it.

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• NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Understand the Steam Controller came out 10 years ago and was meant to be used in the decade or two prior to that when “real PC games” didn’t support gamepads. Contrast that with today where CRPGs and RTSes often have official bindings.

  There are two ways to use a trackpad. The first is to swipe (like a laptop trackpad) and the second is press and hold. For the former, the delta between where your thumb is and where it was is used to translate to cursor movement. For the latter, think of it like an analog stick. The center of the trackpad is 0 and your input is the delta between 0 and the location of your thumb at this moment.

  So press and hold lets it emulate an analog stick and swiping is very useful for moving a cursor on the screen. And there are/were plenty of ways to switch between the modes on the fly.

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• MellowYellow13@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  For real it looks like complete garbage. Joysticks are good, not bad.

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• dualpad@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  If you are curious here is some of my gameplay video in games like Doom Eternal, Left 4 Dead 2, The Finals, etc.

  Was the first controller that allowed me to completely drop aim assist for good and not feel slow against PC players and offer keyboard like functionality for input swapping.

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