Yes that was one of the heavily overlooked aspects of the steam controller. The thing was so versatile it literally was crazy. Instead it got hammered for being too complicated and you actually had to learn to use that thing.
Absolutely. Having extra buttons is a good thing and something both Microsoft and Sony are afraid to change about their consoles. Valve and PC games are the only ones willing to take control chances
Indeed this is basically what the Steam controller provided (and all the testers ignored by criticizing it that it was not an xbox controller). Thats also the reason why after the initial criticism the steam controller now is regarded as one of the best controllers ever done for the pc, it was all the software and innovative approach.
@@werpu12 To be fair to reviewers, this is functionality that was added a good year or so after the SC came out. Reviewers and the public dismissed the SC too quickly, but also it took a long time for even Valve to realise all its potential. They didn't even include gyro aiming as a default option on release, it was added as a default template only after the community made a big thing of it. The handy thing is the deck can take advantage of everything learned over the lifespan of the SC. Just hope the success of the Deck allows for a SC2.
If you ever watched part of the steam input presentation from valve you'd know they thought of something big that only a few implemented. Look at No Man's sky. It has multiple tabs on the default configuration. 2 of them are for on foot and flight. Without those tabs you'd have manual toggles for action sets. With these tabs it switches automatically freeing up space. The presentation presented the idea of thinking in "actions" instead of inputs. Instead of press A to jump, it's press jump to jump. You then let the user assign what input goes to jump.
Even though I'm very familiar with Steam Input features I think it is really cool to see these for the Steam Deck not only because the UI is different from the desktop version but also because Steam Deck has more input methods than the Steam Controller so it's cool to see practical use cases for the extra buttons.
Pretty awesome! The configurability Never stops surprising me. I would love to see a few more examples for different games. And I hope developers take advantage of these features
I return to this video over and over again. Thanks to your tutorial I'm able to play WH4K Gothic Armada with my steam deck with all the hot keys in my track pads layers.
Duuuuuuude, your videos are changing the way I play games. No longer getting frustrated with not fully supported games but charging the configuration of the steam deck controls and adding layers makes them so much fun now
Trackpads also are great for movement and camera control. The right trackpad as trackball allows for insanely fast camera swipes combined with fine movement. Aka... swift swipe the camera literally is flying into the direction in a speed almost not achievable with a mouse. Touch the pad again with your thumb the cam comes to an instant stop and then you can use the thumb for fine granularity. Unfortunately not every game with cam control can work like that, many are too rigid in their thumbstick controls or switch to mouse keyboard entry and adjust their help messages accordingly (witcher 3 being a major offender in this area) Valve has added some simulated mouse joystick input (aka send joystick signals close to a mouse) but this is not entirely the same as going raw trackball mode.
@@werpu12 very true on all counts. I challenged myself to put movement on right pad on the Steam Controller and now all of my builds start that way. Camera control with pad + gyro is second only to a mouse, as well
Also possible to set the other trackpad menu as a Mode-Shift to L4 so you don't need to set an Action Layer. You can also assign Quick Save and Quick Load to the same "button" in Menus. Add extra command and set one as regular and another as e.g long press, double press etc. E.g you can assign regular press for flashlight, long press for Night vision goggles.
I have been watching steam deck vids for a week and this is the first time I am hearing about this feature. that is wild and I am excited to try out options.
My favorite layer thing to do is have the right trackpad act as a dpad when you click it. That’s 4 buttons (even 5 if you add a center button) nested under the trackpad you’re using all the time for aiming
As I played the Worms series quite a bit, in the Steam configuration (and sometimes using ControllerCompanion which is similar and existed before Steam Input) I set up quick select combinations for weapons. So holding select and pressing B brings up the grenade, A the bazooka etc., that sort of stuff I did some specific things to aid me in specific situations in certain games. For example, in Rocket League, I made it so when I press a shoulder button, the right trackpad will simply do nothing but pull the camera down. This allows me to effectively have two camera settings, one for dribbling where I can see from atop my car, and the regular one for everything else (wish they'd just make the ball transparent so you can dribble properly without shenanigans)
This was super informative and well explained, any videos explaining functionalities of the deck that might not be obvious for the average user are great
My favourite is directional swipe on gyro by pressing L2. In WoW i use it to play my druid to transform to a cat or bear by moving the steam deck up or down. And when i press L2 and L3 together, then moving the controller around does heal abilities.
Legend, huge thanks for the important explanation I was looking for exactly how to do 1 button to have other options on already used controls. Really wanted to nest/chain commands and I think this will be my goto trick!
Let me go ahead and click that bell. I want all your videos. I have had my Steam deck for about three days now and it is way better than I even imagined. The trackpad and controller support is a game changer.
Thanks for this! I working on getting Guild Wars 2 set up the way I want. There are some community presets already out there but none of them are quite right, so this will be a big help.
Awesome man. Thanks for the demonstration. So glad the Deck has action layers. I'll be using them for basic umbrella configurations for FFXIV. When I touch the center it will turn the whole TouchPad into an analog stick. When I tap certain zones it'll activate a face button or a directional pad press. I'm going to save the Joysticks for Radial Menu shortcuts.
Oh man this is amazing, I'm playing old games like Resident Evil 5, I'm using a Dualsense with full Keyboard Binding just be able to aim with Gyro as Mouse. I wanted to create a Layer where I can just hit a button and it will shift to Controller type so I can do the QTE properly. I think this is the key to do it.
Controller support for Steam is impressive. Now, Sony and Nintendo should improve pad support. I used layers and sets, my Fighting Stick doesnt have LS and RS. I set up Layers for LS and RS.
I like it, I'm not big on messing with controller mapping buy I definitely see the value in it. I'm currently playing fallout 4 on pc and SHOULD re map puncing/throwing Alt button to something but keep putting it off
Thank you for your help, this days it's difficult to come by people like you, i want you to know that my heart will never stop appreciating your generosity..
This might be the best way (and the only way) to play Mario Galaxy 2 without a Wii mote portably. in theory, you could map that star icon to the track pad, have the shoot button mapped to ZR, and you're done.
If I could upvote u 100x, I would… I’m playing guild wars 2 and trying to have my controller set up like ff14. And I couldn’t add an extra left trigger shift mode but thanks to you this works. I ❤ u. I been trying to figure out for 2 days.
This is really nice to mimick pressing a button, like middle mouse, to change what the mouse movement does. For example, normal mouse movement moves the cursor, and moving it while pressing middle button rotates the camera. One crazy idea is to use this to type using the buttons, lol. For example, pressing L4 makes the d-pad, ABYX buttons and shoulder buttons type letters A-L, and while pressing R4 they type M-X, etc... Yeah, you'd have to learn a new typing system, there's why it's crazy.
Came back to say that Action Sets will work great with Diablo 4. Specifically for navigating menus, skills, inventory etc. By using Mouse&Keyboard commands. Having the trackpad enable a layer that gives you a mouse and changes triggers to clicks, back buttons to shift for compare, Space for junk and other necessities. Then when you take your finger off, you're back to the Default controller and ready to fight demons. However I did find that for trackpad touch there might be a problem if you set it to "Hold Action Layer". It didn't switch properly, but very easy fix: Set trackpad touch to change the action set to M&K (or however you name it) and now it's changed permanently, but you enter M&K's bindings and go to trackpad and tell it to switch to Default on trackpad release. So both layers will have a command to switch to the other one. It may very well work with just the hold command (like you showed in your video), but it didn't for me at the time. Maybe because my layer was in parallel (not under) the Default layer so that all my commands were blank and not inherited. Don't know. Try it if you have Diablo. You'll be much happier with navigating the menus/UI like this 😁
For something as straightforward as "save state/load state," I'd probably just map them to L4 and R4 directly, but it's definitely useful to have tutorials for these input options and neat to think of the crazy amount of possibilities.
Is there a way to download other people's configurations? I'm imagining different games having their own popular input set ups you can just grab quickly and start playing with
Yes this has been in there since the Steam controller. Actually Valve is building upon thousands of user configurations already which were done for the SC and now work for the deck... So you already should have a good coverage of customized user inputs for many many games.
RU-vid only lets me press once on the Like button. I know this because I tried it 99 times. Had to be an odd number of course. Great short video, thanks! ^^
Been setting up a World of Warcraft Controller Binding for awhile, and thanks to this I went from 8 Action Bar Slots to 16 For those curious cause WoW doesn't natively have Controller Support, and I'm running 3.3.5 WOTLK (NOT CLASSIC I'm on a Private Server, so this is the original WOTLK) which doesn't support Controller Mods period Instead I use the Bartender 4 mod/addon and set 8 action bars to have 3 slots each, then set 4 to vertical, and 4 to horizontal, and thanks to. BT4's snap mode I can make a cross by snapping a Vertical Action Bar inside a Horizontal one do this 4x, and size them up by 1.5x and BOOM I just recreated FFXIV's Controller UI which you can look that up for reference, now I just setup the D-Pad, and Face Buttons I set them all up 1-8, and then used an Action Layer and set them up again, but used Shift then 1-8 for each using the Sub-Command option for multiple buttons, then just changed the keybind with BT4's built in Keybind Setup (which is just click action bar icon, and then click the keybind you want it to be set to, so the D-Pad of choice, or Face Button) Now I just set the Action Layer activator to Hold and put it on the Left Shoulder Button, and done. Now that's just the tip of the iceberg, I setup Target Keybinds that target nearby enemies, that you can click to cycle, or hold to loot after your done with it, and I have Auto-Loot enabled, so it just pulls it all into my Bags That and so much more, tbh this is better then the Controller Mod I remember, and it's all in a Steam Deck, so I'm very happy with it. I especially like how because everything is layed out like a Controller UI, I don't need to think about what is where, or too many sub-commands I just click the associated button, and if need be use the mode shift to get the Action Layer which ALSO has every button layed out for convenience of sight
As I have never been a fan of the dpad there are certain games where I will have an action layer that temporarily converts one of the sticks to a dpad to select stuff (like Elden Ring which has a specific dpad quick-menu). Might also make one that swaps from gamepad style gameplay to gyro/mouse controls.
Thank you so much! I made an action layer for Monster Hunter Rise where holding LT activates gyro for blademasters, but double clicking right analog switches to Gunner mode where both LT and RT activate gyro (also for Insect Glaive) but couldn't figure out how to do it on Deck
Excellent tutorial on action sets. I would like to make a Subsistence action layer for my left track pad to bring up the map AND scan the entire map. Any ideas how? I’ve mapped (M) when clicking the left track pad brings up the map, but I can’t see anything other than my current area. This is an important action to be able to do.
Hello, your videos are great! I used them to create two virtual menus depending on ActionSets on XCOM. However, I would have preferred to have two action layers inheriting from only one Action Set, and only set the menus depending on the activated layer. I there a way to set an action layer by default on an action set?
I am unable to modify the default settings in a game that has a game pad setting by such as Final Fantasy 14 using the action sets. Is there a way to over ride this?
This video is amazing. Q: Say you wanted to use a radial action set to rotate objects in your hand. What PC keyboard commands would emulate do so on the Steam Deck? I.e. Forward, backward, right 90^ or 180^ flip, left 90^ or 180^ flip. Trying to build structures.
Is there any way to do a button combo? Like if l1 and r1 are their own inputs but you can activate a third input by clicking them both at the same time?
I bought Nights Into Dreams and the title screen says “Press Enter to start” and none of the buttons are mapped to Enter. I went into the controller setup just like in this video but I don’t see an option to set the Pause button for example as Enter. Can you describe exactly how to do that?
I like having options. I won't bother chaniging controls for every game, but for Elder scrolls like games, that i intend to play for hundreds of hours, i will do that, and i will also play around with frs and framerates. Is there any way to save a couple of power and control profiles for specific games? When i play skyrim at home on the deck, i don't care about power consumption and might play it with mouse and keyboard, on the road, i'd like different settings, also i need a higher frame rate with a racing sim than with a click and point adventure. It seems easy enough to change all that, but my personal perfect settings for a game, might be terrible for a different game.
Does anyone has more crashes with a heavy custom layout with radial menu's ? seems like if they are quite heavy with alot of bindings and all it will corrupt it and is prone to alot of crashing of the steamdeck
