Imagine being stuck at the bottom of the deep blue sea and the first thing you’ll gaze upon after the hatch opens is the almighty GabeN.
“Oh, you’re finally awake”
The question is, which controller he uses to drive it?
Thanks to Steam Input, he can use any controller
#1 reason I prefer buying games on Steam. The convenience of this is insane.
Btw if you add your “epic” games as non-steam games in steam, you can use the steam overlay and change controller bindings like a steam game. It also is a great way to run windows software on Linux without tinkering.
Yep, this is also the #1 reason I have no intention to buy games on Epic going forward. I had to do this for well over a year to use my Series X|S controller over Bluetooth with HITMAN III. They’re paying for exclusivity explicitly so that I can’t buy games on Steam, then I have to launch their launcher through Steam anyway because their platform sucks, so I just end up with an annoying middleman that makes me ask “why?”
It’s a great tip for all the free games though.
How does Steam Input work? Does it contain drivers for almost any controller, or does it just map inputs for those controllers to Xinput?
It has support for a lot of controllers, including the popular console ones. It’s really a nifty feature of Steam.
Most non-xbox controllers use well-known USB extents that are universally recognized as belonging to a generic controller. Windows will display a controller icon, libraries like pygame and SDL 2 will process them as regular controllers, etc. As such, most controllers need no drivers. The exception is that games written with directX use xinput, which is proprietary and has licensing costs to get your controller into (to prevent low-cost controllers from undercutting Microsoft’s price-gouging official offering).
Converting USB controller to xinput has famously been a really hard problem, requiring a lot of fancy software that is often incompatible with anticheat and copy protection. Steam is able to do it because the steam overlay is whitelisted by everything that could block it, and is otherwise developped by really great devs.
In the process of intercepting inputs to the game and translating them, you can imagine it’s quite easy to swap a button for another, that’s how controller remapping works. Some devs additionnally provide steam with custom things a controller may do that may not have a key assigned but becomes callable from a key through the overlay.
Gabe has a warehouse full of new old stock steam controllers, nothing beats dual touchpads for precision
Might be a hot take, but I loved the steam controller. I killed two of them just through constant use and abuse and I still wish I could get another.
Oh well, my steam deck is enough for now.
It is outstanding, the ergonomics are much more comfortable than Steam Deck, and the disc-shaped pads are roomier. I’d love to see a Frankenstein mod of Steam Deck that adds Steam Controller grips to it. But honestly, I think the sheer length and weight of the thing is a limiting factor in terms of comfortability.
I found the deck to be comfortable enough for my purposes. That being said a steam controller grip would be great.
I mainly got it to develop against it, so it seems like it shines when docked. I have mild RSI, and I found it a bit cumbersome to play with handheld for longer than twenty minutes or so. It seems like there isn’t an ideal posture/grip combination that feels natural. You have to hold it up and away from your body, and in so doing, it becomes heavy. Or you cradle it and then you have to crane your neck downwards. It’s just a series of trade-offs coming from the unorthodox formfactor. I’ve seen this issue raised from time to time, but I concede that it’s a minority problem.
They were a great design but, like you say, you killed two of them… they just didn’t have the robustness or QA. But, to do that right, they would have been more expensive, and they were already fairly pricey. Personally, I hope they re-release them, or something like them, sometime down the road, but I’m not gonna hold my breath.
God what timeline am I in lol
The Crazy Timeline
I am expecting a name like James Cameron, not our lord and saviour Gabe.
A billionaire fucked around showing off and found out. One less billionaire bent on acquisition and greed at humanity’s expense. So sad…
How many homeless could we house/treat/feed for the cost of rescuing this billionaire and his cadre who didn’t risk their lives for scientific data or anything noble, but for wasteful luxury tourism? Why take interest when one of the world’s oppressors takes his own life while ignoring the innumerable victims of the world’s oligarch class who didn’t capitalism well enough and got thrown away like garbage?
The international community when a boat packed with refugees sinks: This is so sad, but our hands are tied. If only they had thought about this before being born in a poor nation.
The international community when three rich people go missing on vacation: DEPLOY EARTH’S ENTIRE NAVY TO RESCUE THESE INTREPID HEROES
EDIT: To be clear, I think we should try our best to rescue everyone who is in a shipwreck, including the people in this submarine.
I think the wreckage of this sub should be added as a curiosity to future tours of the titanics remains.
Showing off? Nobody knew what this guy was doing, or his name even, before all this blew out. Lol.
Are you shitting me, I thought this was a meme post at first.
I took a look at the Wikipedia page for this submarine, and wow. It made 4 of the 7 manned visits to Challenger Deep, the deepest point on Earth. It visited the deepest point in all 5 oceans. It’s not just any submarine, this is the submarine.
With a second submarine, you could potentially have even more casualties. Luckily there’s already an unmanned sub in the area.
A bit of trivia for folks, GabeN’s sub is named after a ship called the Limiting Factor from Iain M. Bank’s absolutely wonderful book, The Player of Games. All of the subs that Triton Submersibles make are named after ships in the Culture series of books. I’d highly recommend checking them out, although don’t start with Consider Phlebas, I consider The Player of Games to be a better entry point into the series.
Off topic, but I figured I’d share anyways.
EDIT: the SpaceX landing barges are also named after Culture ships.
I love the Culture series, Iain Banks was a great author and taken from us too soon. His vision of the future is one that feels utopian and achievable. To me it feels like what could happen in a post-scarcity society. And his stories are just fantastic.
This is such a cool tidbit of info, thanks for sharing. I’ll have to give that series a look.
edit. So is you’re recommended read order - book 2, then 1, then on to 3?
Some folks say something like that, others say to save book 1 for later. It’s not 1 long arc, each book is an independent story with new characters in the same universe.
Are you ready for a miracle?
The article says explosive decompression. That is a mistake. It should be implosive compression.
@tangelo I thought this had to be a joke, but wow. I wonder if they are anywhere near where they could respond and help (though they might need at least a general it should be around here first given the constraints on going further around or going further down).
Ha wow this is nuts.
