#Portal 2 custom valve intro software
#Portal 2 custom valve intro Pc

#Portal 2 custom valve intro Pc

But those are kinks that can be worked out in the future as developers (potentially) learn to keep the living room in mind even for PC games.

#Portal 2 custom valve intro software

Baldur’s Gate asked me to name a character and then I realized I had no keyboard-although the software keyboard in the Steam overlay will work in a pinch. The text in Civ V, for instance, is miniscule even on my fairly large TV. Hell, I played Baldur’s Gate on my couch! This week I played Civilization V on my couch. These are experiences that have traditionally been considered “PC only,” and for good reason-they’re reliant on a mouse and/or keyboard, and the joystick is a poor substitute. It’s not the precision of a mouse, but it’s closer.

And for shooters, I feel you get some degree of greater accuracy than you get with a standard dual-joystick setup. I’m not necessarily interested in a discussion about whether you could play games that already work well on a controller on this controller. The experiences the Steam Controller opens up- that’s what matters. Valve’s apparently working with developers to make sure that doesn’t happen moving forward, but for now you might find some games where it won’t work. The only problem is some games lock the mouse when you plug in a gamepad, which makes this mode impossible. I first discovered it while playing Portal 2, and I’ve since set it up in every game I can find that supports it. It’s hard to explain, but trust me when I say it’s the best control scheme the Steam Controller has to offer. Any PC capable of seamlessly switching between controlling the camera on a mouse and controller can run a setup Valve’s calling “Gamepad with High Precision Camera/Aim.” You move with the left stick, but the right haptic pad functions something like a trackball-not physically, since there is no ball to speak of, but the haptics fool your thumb into believing that’s what you’re aiming with. Mouse: This is where the Steam Controller really shines.Scroll your finger clockwise for one action, counter-clockwise for another. It’s your mouse’s scroll wheel, but done on a trackpad. It doesn’t work that well though, and you can see why Valve eventually added an actual analog stick onto the controller for movement. The Steam Controller tries to emulate the behavior of a joystick, so the closer your thumb gets to the edge of the pad the faster you move/turn the camera/whatever. Joystick move/camera: This is by far the weirdest mode.Button pad: A bit less intuitive, but basically you can map four additional A/B/X/Y buttons to the pad-especially useful for keyboard-heavy games with a lot of hotkeys.

This is useful for switching guns in a shooter, for instance. The left haptic pad even has a vaguely D-pad shaped cross embedded in it.

Directional Pad (D-Pad): This one’s obvious.

Each touchpad can be remapped to five different input modes. But I don’t think I truly understood their potential until I spent some time with the controller. No surprise-they’re what the entire thing was built around. The large haptic pads are the Steam Controller’s secret sauce. What I find fascinating about the Steam Controller is you can fundamentally change the way it works-and, in the process, completely shake up how you interface with certain games. Using Joy2Key or what-have-you, you can easily swap the buttons around on your Xbox 360/Xbox One/DualShock controller even if developers didn’t bother building that functionality into the game.īut that’s like changing a car’s paint job and calling it a “custom build” in comparison to the Steam Controller. It’s not like this is the only remappable controller on the PC.