First things first: Big Picture has a habit of filling up your screen and can’t be minimised quickly so use alt+tab to get back here! You can hold down the Steam button on your controller in Big Picture and select Minimise Big Picture but it’s a bit slow.
So what you want to do is get into Big Picture from the desktop by pressing the Steam button on your pad. Go to Settings (the little cog in the top right) and under Controller go to ‘Base Configurations’ and select ‘Desktop configuration’ (as per screenshot up thread). You should be on a screen like this:
Load this link to bring up my browsing config: steam://controllerconfig/413080/736981716
That should take you straight back to Big Picture and bring up Gregg’s Browser Bindings. Press X on your controller to apply that config. This should apply the config as the default desktop configuration so when Steam loads on system startup you’ll be able to turn your controller on and be able to use it straight away like a mouse.
Now if you go back to Windows you should hopefully be able to use your controller to mouse around. If you look at the screenshot just above, that’s what I’ve set all the buttons to, so you’ve got refresh on thumbstick and left trackpad press. You’ve zoom in/zoom out on the shoulder buttons. Left click on the right trigger and right click on the left trigger (this felt more intuitive to me but you can easily switch it around). X and Y are page up and page down for quick scrolling, B is close window and A is new tab. The rear grips are Back and Forwards for browsing. The left trackpad can also be used as a scroll wheel. Have a play around with it and if there’s anything you’re not happy with go back to Big Picture and make some changes as you see fit!
If you want to use the gyro for mousing around then you’ll want to press this button in Big Picture:
Go to Style of Input and select Mouse. From there there’s various settings and ‘Additional Settings’ over on the right. Have a poke around. If you get a bit lost come back here.
I just made a desktop config for gyro mousing here: steam://controllerconfig/413080/915765737 Same again: load it up then press X to apply.
That’s got quality of life adjustments but, again, feel free to tweak it yourself and get comfortable. You can have it Always On or enabled when you hit a particular button. There’s a lot to unpack here but the best advice I have is to experiment and see what does what and what works best for you :-)
For anyone interested, steam link (20) and controller (35) are both on sale on the Steam Store and Amazon has matched the prices on the separate items. I bought from Amazon, which is 5 more for the pair (50 on steam), but saved 12 bucks in shipping.
Got the controller. Don’t have the link for a couple days, but that’s fine. The controller itself seems pretty nice. My biggest issue is that the B button is exactly where it feels like the A button should be and A, X, and Y are all a bit of a reach (I have tiny widdle hands). I’ve actually swapped A and B for the moment.
@geggis I was messing around with the base configurations a little, and my expectation was that when it created a new game profile, it would use the setting from the base big picture configuration, but that didn’t happen. If I understand correctly, you can’t base a new game config on an existing game config; you have to export it first. Is that right?
I’m thinking I should pick one game to mess with (was thinking Deadly Tower of monsters) and try to get comfortable with the controller and learn some of the possibilities.
Oh, one other question. Is there no way to bind a button to double-click?
Yeah, you have to create a config and export/save it. Then when you’re in another game you can load that config up by going into Your Other Games, make any adjustments, then save that one out separately. This is a good way of ensuring your mouse settings or bog standard controller tweaks are somewhat standardised. For instance, I like to lower the trackball friction and give a touch of mouse acceleration, as well as adjust the rotation so I can swipe horizontally accurately. I also remove haptics for mousing!
With regards to double-click… y’know, I hadn’t thought about that. I’ll have to try this later:
I’ve not messed around with activators much but they seem pretty simple to use.
Ah, ok. I had bound both soft press and full to left click and was expecting it to double. I had the right idea, just need to go about it a different way.
There are so many features/options.
Good to know I can pull a config from another game, as I had hoped. I had thought that it would grab adjustments from the base configuration, but it doesn’t seem to do that. Long as there’s a way, I’m good.
Hopefully I get a bit more time to mess with it today.
Thanks!
Edit: my favorite thing I’ve discovered so far: touch activation. Add right click on touch to the right pad. Bam! Instant mouselook on games that don’t support it. I used a lua script to accomplish that on my G13, but this is so much more elegant. In that case, it is setup where any movement key enables it. I suppose here I will have to create a shift-state that turns it off so I can interact with things when need be. Shouldn’t be a big deal.
Ah, clever! I’d not considered that. My time with Guild Wars 2 is long gone, but yeah, that would have been perfect. All the options and features are really exciting if you’re a bit creative and in need of a particular style of control or type of input.
Yeah, I have a long history of issues with my right hand (wrist and thumb, esp) Not severe/crippling, but I spend a lot of time/energy/money keeping it that way. I generally rebind left click to a key on the g13 and holding down right click for long periods is a big no-no for me.
On the flip side, I have a tendency to grip controllers too tightly, which can be a problem. Also hoping I can adjust to the placement of the axby as mentioned above.
I am about to try a Steam Controller with Surgeon Simulator per my son’s request. (The game seems to require mouse and keyboard, there is a PS4 version but it apparently relies on the gyro in the PS4 controller which does not exist on our Xbone controllers.)
I predict this will end badly for everyone involved.
I kinda hated the steam controller after playing Surgeon Simulator, but I think that had more to do with the “ha, ha, the literal gameplay is the controls sucking ass” nature of Surgeon Simulator than the controller.
I’m replaying Portal and Portal 2 with my son, and although I couldn’t get it to work with Portal (man the UI for that game has not aged well), it works exceptionally well with Portal 2. I’m digging the mouselook-ability of left-stick as WASD and right-pad as, well, the mouse.
Ironically I had to play Portal 1 with the Xbone controller so this is turning into a solid apples-to-apples test.
I need a lot more time with it, but I get the nagging sense that the Steam Controller is kind of caught between a rock (just use a damn keyboard + mouse) and a hard place (most games that even pretend to support a controller, work fine with any old generic x360/ps3 style controller).
In other words, you only use the Steam Controller when you have to use it, because the game only supports mouse and keyboard and this is mostly-sorta-working way of forcing a controller on the game without wanting to cut your arm off in the process.
I’m curious, what games do you guys play where the steam controller isn’t just a necessary oddity, but the hands-down best control choice there is? I want to hear about situations where the steam controller is ridiculously appropriate to the game, and better than the alternatives?
Helldivers was absolutely better for me than both the Xbox controller and mouse and keyboard. I got the fluid movement of a thumbstick coupled with much more customisable aiming (via response curve tweaking) and a d-pad where I could disable diagonals entirely to prevent fluffing up Strategem summoning (the Xbox controller has a shit d-pad for this). I tried assigning the outer edge of the thumbstick to sprint but it triggered a bit too easily in a pinch.
The dual stage triggers for Rocket League and accelerate/boosting is just so intuitive and pretty much essential for me now. I’d never play Rocket League with mouse and keyboard, but this isn’t something you can do with an Xbox controller. Do PS controllers have dual stage triggers? Edit: I forgot that I also have dual stage for brake and reverse!
I dabbled with Lara Croft and The Guardian of Light a year or so back and set it up so that I could put shooting right on the outer edge of the right track pad. That felt really great and something that I’d like to apply to other top-down shooters. I tried it on Helldivers but was a bit too afraid of friendly fire to practice it more!
The one genre I think the Steam Controller will excel at, and the one I’m yet to try it on unfortunately, is third-person shooters. I always prefer them on controller but I hate thumbstick aiming. Splatoon showed me how intuitive and powerful gyro/motion aiming can be and the Steam Controller can do that. The problem is, as I’ve discovered since buying it, I don’t play many third-person shooters. Edit: I did get a gyro/motion aiming profile set up for Eldritch back when I wanted to experiment with it. That felt really intuitive and I can imagine it transferring well over to a third-person game.
Another major use for me is playing games like Chaos Reborn and Antihero. For Antihero, I’d argue the Steam Controller is better because you can assign the cursor keys to the thumbstick (you can’t reassign them in-game and cursor keys always feel unnatural to me). It’s pretty perfect for these kinds of simple TBS games.
For general desktop use and browsing on the sofa it’s great until you need to use your keyboard.
Other than that though, I agree that it is an oddity and can sometimes feel, not unnecessary, but perhaps too specialist? It’s rare I use my Xbox controller instead of it though and I welcome the added functionality it has for when I need it.
Ah, of course, analog is dual stage, in which case it’s a question of whether you want to set that up through the Steam configurator using your controller of choice. The configurator is controller agnostic now, right? All that stuff was ‘locked in’ with the SC when I first picked it up.
I don’t use the grip buttons as often as I should to be honest. They’re really useful when I remember.
None for me. The ABXY button placement on the Steam controller is super awkward for my small hands. I also dislike the touch pad vs analog sticks. With the support for the PS4 controller as steam native now I have zero reasons to keep using it except maybe, one day, for some weird mouse/kb game that I just have to play on the TV. Which doesn’t happen in my case.
I do like the paddles on the back, it’s the only missing piece vs the PS4 that I would like. Otherwise the PS4 controller has a touch pad + gyro that all work well.
I loooooove the steam controller interface work they have done over the past couple of years. I think it would be in their best interest to separate out the API they have made and port it to consoles.
I prefer the Steam controller for pretty much all controller games because using the right pad in “rollerball” mode feels a million times better than using a stick.
One specific example of the Steam controller being better than a normal controller is for Dark Souls 3. I think it’s in the game’s official Steam controller configuration, and it adds a touch pad to the right pad that mimics the D-pad, and it adds sprinting and item use to the grips. So some of the functions that are technically possible on a controller but super awkward (switching your weapon or item while sprinting, or moving the camera while sprinting) become simple.
There doesn’t seem to be a thread for the Steam Link so I figured I’d post my tale here.
tldr: Love this thing.
Long version. I got the Link and Controller when it released, in late 2015 I believe. I have a difficult situation – I wanted to stream from my home office PC on the third floor to my HDTV on the first floor, near the router. The house is 100+ years old with lots of stone and brick, real solid.
In my office on the third floor, the WiFi signal was decent, so I never hardwired the PC. So when I got the Steam Link I figured it should be fine. Wrong. I could connect to the Link but there was lag galore. After a while I gave up trying and wrote it off as a wasted purchase.
Yesterday, itching to play some 64-bit only games that won’t run on my old laptop, I tried again. I took a WiFi extender that was plugged into an outlet on the second floor, and moved it up to the third floor. The extender has an ethernet port, so I hardwired the office PC into the extender, then tried the Steam Link again.
Now it runs flawlessly. I can play anything on my couch with zero lag. I also bought a wireless keyboard and mouse combo, and plug the dongle into the Steam Link for games where kb/m is better than the controller. I leave the PC in sleep mode, and can wake it from the first floor with Steam Link – so if want to play something for a few minutes, I don’t need to run up two flights of stairs, then back down.
So if anyone finds that hardwiring to the router is not an option, try hardwiring to a WiFi extender. It made the difference for me.
And it only took me a year and a half to figure it out.
If I’m at my desk, I don’t really use it (Helldivers was an exception), because I’d rather use M&K. My steam controller gets the most use when I’m on the couch using the SteamLink and I’m emulating M&K.
So my Steam Controller seems to be freaking out a bit. It was working fine earlier today as I was playing Dark Souls 2, but I tried to switch over to Mafia 3 and it went haywire.
The guide button no longer works.
The the left thumbstick is functioning as the directional pad (both in-game and in the BPM menus).
The right pad is only detecting in some games.
Face buttons are not working in-game.
Triggers are not working in or out of game.
I’ve put in fresh batteries, rebooted, changed USB ports for the dongle, recovered the firmware, and gone through the calibration process several times.
I can’t, however, complete the diagnostic process for the controller in BPM, because the first test is to depress the left trigger completely, and it’s not registering.
Any thoughts? I’ve been using the controller pretty regularly since it first came out, and I’ve never encountered issues like this…
Did you try pulling the dongle out then reinserting it? If mine starts doing odd stuff that usually sorts it. Other than that, you’ve exhausted what else I’d suggest. Hope you figure it out.
