It uses two clickable touchpads instead of analog sticks. The pads have haptic feedback. They can have buttons mapped to different areas on them. If anything, it seems like Valve is trying to innovate, which I can at least appreciate.
What some game developers are saying about it.
"It's tough to grok the touch feedback until you try it out," he said in an e-mail. "You pick it up, and, for the first few minutes, you're mostly just moving your thumbs over the trackpads and marveling at what you're feeling." -Ichiro Lambe of Dejobaan Games
"This sounds weird, but it's almost like rolling two weighted trackballs that are too large to actually fit into the controller," Lambe said as he tried to explain what it's like to have one's thumbs on those two trackpads. "For camera controls, slide one thumb to the right, and you'll feel this ticking, like you're turning a physical control. Flick your thumb quickly, and this imaginary physical thing reacts like something with weight to it—the 'trackball' continues to roll for a bit, eventually coming to a rest. And since it's all controlled through the software, the same trackpad then becomes more like a mouse or a laptop trackpad when you're navigating through menus. Dynamic!"
"Spelunky requires Whip, Jump, Bomb, and Rope buttons. We configured the controller to play like an Xbox controller. So the left circle pad was once again used for the directional buttons, and the right circle pad was used as A, B, X, Y buttons in the orientation that you find on an Xbox Controller....I played through Spelunky and the controller worked great. As I was playing I was describing to the engineers the twitch movements that go into Spelunky... The Steam controller handled this just fine" -Team Meat's Tommy Refenes
Thoughts?
Looks odd yo.![]()
Looks like something that I would never get used to and end up breaking.
A gamepad, you say?
No sticks on said pad, you say?
Nay, I say!
A controller you can program to work like an xbox controller that looks horrible and looks uncomfortable. I think I'll pass.
Well, this is....
Looks like it has LESS buttons than current console pads.
Looks ugly as ****, but looks are unimportant, what matters is performance and handling, which I cannot comment on except the apparent lack of buttons (unless it has loads round the backside, which I doubt).
Will probably pass but will wait for more info, but from a PC-centric corp. I was expecting better in terms of functionality (buttons).
No idea what to make of the touch pads. Could be more precise than sticks maybe, maybe not?
So basically a mouse with keyboard functions in a controller hardware..... But no keypad.
Valve you need to sort your stuff out.
#WhereIsL4D3
haha, you guys. Its different! Beat it with a stick till it decides to be like everything else!
I signed up for the Steam Hardware BETA. Want to see what this will do.Originally Posted by jook13