… cough what about pinkeye? … cough

Godot 4.7 will probably be out of beta sometime in May, btw, judging from their pace of dev to beta builds.

That is a promise he is literally incapable of keeping.

If he has 0 strategy for filtering out AI gen content… how on Earth is he going to decide what constitutes adult content, and then block that?

Army of content reviewers, like mainstream social media?

… An AI filtering system?

Just him and his crew making random decisions based on who annoys them vs who supplicates themselves to them?

Huh.

Get a grip trainer?

… Do we all count as veterans of the psychic war now?

We certainly don’t fear the reaper anymore.

Here’s what it sounds like when I use a computer. =P

Genuine question: Do you prefer smaller sized mice?

… You may just actually have small hands.

For reference I’m 7.5 inches from thumbpad/root to index finger, arguably on the cusp between how mice are often sized as small vs medium… and I can handle the chonker that is the Steam Deck just fine.

Its probably the same or close to the default hardware mapping as the default SteamInput mode for a Deck, in Desktop mode, would be my guess, basically sans virtual keyboard as Steam does its own virtual keyboard via Steam/SteamInput.

Obviously works much better and fully featured with the SteamInput system, but it isn't a total brick if you don't have Steam.

Which yeah, _should_ mean that it would be possible to write a fully opensource kind of controller manager/bus type thing for it.

It already works on any linux distro you can install Steam on.

Every outlet that you are seeing run a headline about the Steam Controller being in someway ‘controversial’ or ‘has a problem’ or ‘may be divisive’ …

I contend that this is an anti-marketing campaign, being run by basically, potentially, the entire AAA gaming industry that isn’t Valve.

Nearly every major AAA game company is currently imploding right now.

Except Valve.

Because Valve is privately held and owned, it doesn’t have a board of investors to answer to, to constantly juice next quarter profits for.

It doesn’t have a gaggle of people who sit on multiple corporate boards simultaneously, who sit on the boards of industry lobbying groups, who sit on the boards of astroturfed ‘consumer rights’ groups.

These people all know each other, or in some cases literally are the same people.

I of course cannot prove this conclusively, but just… look around.

This is nuts, the number of media outlets going with a non positive angle, in the headline… of a product launch.

Also consider that many of Valve’s direct competition has extensive, direct ties to the AI bubble insano-mania, both hardware and software companies.

… Its not normal to have so many different outlets have such a standardized general framing of … a video game controller launch.

This is what a retired ex corpo ex MSFT employee such as myself would describe as sus.

I might be fabricating a memory, but I could swear that I have actually used something like this, at one point, in a university library.

My hat is warm.

My hat smells safe.

My hat feeds me and pets me.

… I love my hat.

Oh yeah, he nuked that massive repository of technical information, memes, artwork, addons… etc… like, … over a decade ago now?

EDIT:

Sorry, just realized this is a high enough level comment that I shouldn’t wall of text the entire thread.

I think you are describing just one category of a way to stream, when you talk about connecting your controller to your phone, and then the phone acts as a wireless middleman to your PC.

You… can just directly, wirelessly, connect a controller to a PC via a 2.4ghz dongles, usb dongles, bluetooth connections… many ways to do this exist. The Steam Controller uses a usb dongle (which also doubles as a wireless charger for the controller when physically connected), and it also works via bluetooth (iirc).

Streaming is not the same thing as connecting a controller, not necessarily. You can stream the game rendering output from your PC to a TV, or to a phone, or to another PC… and you could do that over a local network, or you could do that from like a server farm across the internet, to a local device that doesn’t have to involve the controller, at all.

Like when you are watching a livestream … thats likely a phone camera or usb camera, streaming, live, to your device.

There are many different protocols and standards for streaming different kinds of content, to and from different kinds of hardware, via differing physical transmission methods, which may or may not support various kinds of input/output as well. Some of these are proprietary, some are open source, some work on some operating systems, specific hardware architecture (x86 vs ARM)… etc.

I do hear what you are saying when a proprietary tech is involved anywhere in the loop. Yes, it is always possible that one day, that could blow up in your face.

However, as best I am aware, SteamInput is a totally open standard… its sort of like a game engine where the source code is ‘available’, but it isn’t fully open to be freely modifiable.

You bring up robotics. You can make a robotics controller program in Godot, I’ve seen people do it. Godot also has an opensource plugin that supports SteamInput. So you could make a robotics project that works with a Steam Controller in that way. I’d say its pretty likely there are other game engines that support Steam Input as well, or other projects that do this in their own way.

But yes, it is always possible that Steam could become evil when Gabe retires/dies.

However, just as others have noted that proprietary designed Nintendo controllers have had people develop software for them that enables them to work on non Nintendo products… I would be amazed if that is not basically the case for the Steam Controller within a year or two, if it isn’t functionally already the case via stuff that’s been developed for the Steam Deck, that would only need updates.

Why does Valve not use a totally open universal standard?

Because no existing totally open universal standards supports all of the input and control functionality that the SteamInput system does.

Steam has a whole system of controller configs, hosted on Steam: A game publisher can issue an ‘official controller template’ for their games on Steam. Through Steam, users can tweak and customize and rebind keys and buttons and commands, and create their own controller templates for games… you can save these locally, tie them to your Steam account so they’ll work across devices, sort of like cloud saves, or, you can even publically upload these controller templates so that other users can use them, and then they can modify them, make their own version, etc.

Would all of this ideally be totally open source?

Yes.

But… Valve had to invent all of this, so they based it off of what they already had, that encourages people to use it with their platform, which is at least currently, a very open and featureful platform, at least as far as platforms go.

They are, after all, in a platform/console war, with other corpos, where said other corpos all have publically traded stocks and thus more money snd also investors they must please, whereas Valve does not.

Valve is not a third party, universal peripheral manufacturer.

They are a first party peripheral manufacturer.

Hopefully this reads less as an ‘I think this is totslly morally correct’ defense, than it does as an explanation.

… but the Steam Controller works with any hardware that can run Steam.

… which is… any PC, thats less than roughly 15-20 years old.

So this is absolutely not the exact same thing as what Nintendo does.

Steam is hardware agnostic. Nintendo is not.

You could run a Steam Controller on a Nintendo Switch, provided you got rid of Nintendo’s operating system, like so:

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/handheld-gaming/steam-shown-running-on-nintendo-switch-thanks-to-latest-proton-beta-fex-2604-translates-x86-to-arm-friendly-instructions-on-linux

Ok, I didn’t downvote you, but…

Its a Steam Controller.

For Steam.

… If you just made up some expectation, contrary to everything that Valve has said about this thing, and marketed it as…

To a certain extent, that is magical thinking, that is abandoning any concept of checking your hopes or expectations against… reality.

If you… want to run… a game… with this controller…

You install Steam, and the game.

Steam is the drivers, for the controller.

If you own the game in a way that you can’t add it to Steam… sorry about your DRM, I guess?

The Steam Controller has always been described by Valve as an evolution of the Steam Deck tech, both hardwsre and software… it pretty much literally is a Steam Deck, without the screen and PC, in a different shape.

EDIT:

IRT to your edit:

Point 1: Correct. The Steam Controller… works through Steam.

Point 2: … I don’t think the first half of this is correct. I’m not 100% sure, but I think you can do this via Moonlight/Sunshine. I mean… I know you can in general stream Steam games from a PC using Moonlight/Sunshine, I’m not 100% sure this will work with a Steam Controller… but it works on a Steam Deck, so… probably will work.

As to the second half of this… yeah, the Steam Controller probably won’t generally work as a controller for a game on a phone. Though FeX may actually somewhat/eventually aid with getting that to being possible.

Any projects? Make your project support Steam Input. I can’t speak for other engines too well, but Godot has GodotSteam, supports Steam Controllers, the SteamInput system.

As to your internet related concerns: Steam has an offline mode. Unless you are running a game via Steam that has its own/extra DRM that requires a constant internet connection, you’ll be fine.

SteamInput works without internet. If it didnt’t, a SteamDeck’s controls would not work at all without internet access. … It does.

EDIT 2:

Just for super duper clarity here:

Making a Steam account costs nothing.

Maintaining a Steam account costs nothing.

Any … .exe or .sh or whatever… can be added to Steam, to be launched and played via Steam.

The… only kind of situation where this wouldn’t work is essentially via a game that is installed/managed by some other platform that basically encrypts the exe in a way that only that platform can decrypt.

A GOG game, or something from Itch.io, with no DRM?

Plop it in Steam, it’ll work.

Can confirm, Garry is a total fucking asshole, who also sucks at coding and software engineering.

He deleted the old Facepunch forums because they were absolutely chalk full of him being a dick needlessly, being told about bugs and problems and better ways to do things, and mocking and banning those people… when they were correct.

He got tired of deleting threads and banning people who functionally developed the game for him, for the purposes of being able to gaslight others, so he just nuked it all.

I was a part of the GMod community since before it was sold for money, when it was a ripoff of JBMod… he has always been like this, and he has never changed.

EDIT:

The Anti Cheat thing on linux and rust is particularly a good example of this kind of incompetence and asswipeitude:

Rust uses Easy Anti Cheat.

… Easy Anti Cheat supports linux, there are a fair number of games that work with EAC, on linux.

What Garry cannot do, is architect a game in such a way that… EAC can work with it, on linux.

… I learned programming by way of creating both game modes … and exploits… for Garrys Mod.

… I was 16, and I could defeat various parts of Garry’s attempts at secure netcode (rather, the framework Garry uses to interperet/wrap/encapsulate Source netcode).

Some ‘friends’ I knew… were even better at it than I was.

Garry is not good at programming.

But according to him, you’re the idiot if you point out any problems with anything he’s ever created.

There’s a review on Steam right now, for Sandbox.

Sometimes, you join a custom gamemode?

Time to download 10 gigabytes.

… there were viruses that propogated through Steam itself, where Garry’s Mod… using a similar way of grabbing files… was the attack vector.

That Valve themselves had to step in and fix, because they didn’t imagine that anyone would make such obtuse and dangerous usage of the Steam/Source protocols, as Garry just… thinks is fine.

Wow I am so surprised that a Facepunch production is a buggy clusterfuck mess on launch, certainly there is no precedent for this having ever happened before.

The steam review linked in the article… its rather long so I’ll put my comments in and then uh, sandbox it in a spoiler tag, but uh… maybe note how AI content is really only one of a lot of quite serious problems.

So basically its just like Garrys Mod… horrrendously designed and optimized, 32 gb RAM min requirement … for a Source Engine game… supposedly it exists for people to build things in, but the documentation is horrendous, and the community is toxic as fuck… and its kinda technically arguably a scam in fun and new ways.

Yep.

Just like Garry’s Mod.

… theres a reason Garry nuked the Facepunch forums, and that reason was to destroy all evidence of his immense and constant clownfuckery.

Ladies… he’s a bear.

He appreciates your fawning, but he doesn’t bat for that team.