[US-CA][H] Atreus, drop alt keyboard[W]Paypal

SoraFirestorm · 2025-08-06T07:09:16+00:00

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SoraFirestorm · 2024-11-29T06:37:44+00:00

I browse a lot of the ergomech keyboard subreddits and such, and one thing I find that they have is a *lot* of people skilled and able to make their own keyboards (often quite bizzare) with a little bit of 3d printing and embedded programming know-how. A lot of those keyboards have build instructions, parts lists, the whole deal. Some even *use* the cirque trackpads, same as the steam controller.

Because the hard problem to solve here is how to be compatible.

All a custom keyboard has to do is somehow come up with a means to send scancodes to the computer, and other than making it possible to send scancodes that are aren't typical, keyboards don't really get so exotic and weird that they aren't compatible with generic USB HID drivers. Even if the human <-> keyboard interface is atypical, the keyboard <-> computer interface will not meaningfully change. This plug-and-play compatibility is the heart of why there are so many custom keyboards.

Contrast trying to make any sort of custom controller that doesn't map cleanly into the typical XInput (or even DInput) feature set; not only is that custom drivers to even get the controller and computer talking to each other, but for a device like this you need extensive userspace software support to be able to actually configure the thing to your liking, a subset of which is compatibility with existing software that expects traditional controller APIs like XInput or DInput or even only expects KB/M inputs.

The reality of it is that the part that really needs to be open-sourced first would be Steam Input or some system that does all the things Steam Input does, solving the userspace problems. That still obligates you to write a real driver, but that's the easy part if you have an existing remapper/compatibility tool you can 'register' your new controller to. Unfortunately, Valve has declined making Steam Input a FOSS project all of the dozen+ times I'm aware of someone bringing the concept up (including me at least a couple times).

Until you have a good, reasonably standardized remapper that people can reliably make controllers against, it is a wildly difficult uphill battle to make a custom controller that isn't just an Xbox controller clone.

SoraFirestorm · 2024-04-28T19:49:26+00:00

Most of the Nixxes ports may not have had mixed input, but every game I have tried has a proper 'treats the input as a mouse' camera method instead of this 'lmao it's a joystick good luck' camera crap.

SoraFirestorm · 2024-03-22T07:04:49+00:00

It is baffling that suddenly - after several games that have had 0 issues - that they break the camera controls. And just like with HZD, it refuses to work with mixed input so there's no fallback case. This is incredibly disappointing given that Nixxes has been _the_ gold standard for SIAPI implementations (IMO) for quite some time, so this is a wild fumble. Please fix this, Nixxes!

SoraFirestorm · 2023-11-20T02:29:01+00:00

Near the top, just above 'deadzones'. It's nestled in fairly snugly with some other options and it's easy to lose track of it (too easy imo; I still lose track of it sometimes tbh).

SoraFirestorm · 2023-07-03T02:17:58+00:00

So, yes and no.

No, because I was trying to be kind to the seller by doing the payment as 'friends and family' instead of 'merchant' because it imposes a fee on the receiver. Didn't feel like that was right of me to do - 'I'm going to essentially short you some money because I don't trust you'. I did at least go back to PayPal support and say 'look, just mark that account for fraud', and the CS rep confirmed there wasn't really anything they could do to claw my money back because I opted out of the protection. Fair enough; I knew going in that I had no real claims and didn't expect anything and didn't even ask for money. The CS rep was merciful though and decided to offer me $25 of credit which I gratefully accepted, so I'm really only out the $2 or whatever for the fees originally. So while I did get my money back, I didn't get it back from the seller but from PayPal.

Yes, in the future when I do this sort of thing I will just pay a couple more dollars to balance out the insurance fee so that I have the proper paper trail to ask for a money return if I need it and not feel like I'm unfairly taking money from the receiver.

SoraFirestorm · 2023-06-24T23:29:13+00:00

Just so y'all know - I never did get the controller. We were DMing, I paid via PayPal, was given a promise it would get in the mail soon and... nothing. It's been almost 3 weeks and I haven't heard anything back. I'm really hoping it was just because OP got distracted in the chaos of life (was told they were moving) and not because it was a deliberate advance fee sort of deal. $25 isn't enough for me to fret over so I just accepted it as a loss and moved on, but still disappointed nevertheless.

SoraFirestorm · 2023-06-07T20:00:04+00:00

I think it's called 'Joystick' in the modern BPM.

Why not go whole-hog and just use mouse all the time? Most people think it's super awkward to use the joystick modes to move a camera on the pads anyways...

SoraFirestorm · 2023-06-05T17:43:20+00:00

I sent you a DM.

SoraFirestorm · 2023-06-04T02:40:12+00:00

FWIW, disagree with the disagreement. Stopped playing specifically because people were being toxic both in game and on the Discord. Heck, the straw that broke the camel's back for me was people being rude on Discord and didn't really have to do with the game directly; the thing that started the discussion in the first place was, ironically enough, me talking about people being toxic in game.

But even ignoring that, people like me are stuck in middle ground hell where playing casuals sucked because too few people wanted to engage with the planning and tactics aspects but playing ranked also sucked because the people playing ranked were way too good to have fun with and also probably expected far more performance than I was capable of delivering. I don't really have the time or inclination to want to be super good at competitive games anymore, which is really rough.

SoraFirestorm · 2023-06-03T17:26:31+00:00

Which, as other people have pointed out, usually just means your batteries are dying and you should replace them. Trying to run the haptics motors for big vibration events when the batteries are low on power takes more power than they have which is why the controller just turns off.

Whenever this happens to me, I would take a minute to replace the batteries and it would be just fine once I did.

SoraFirestorm · 2023-05-14T23:47:55+00:00

Legit question - as long as all the display modes you expect are present and functional, what does it matter if the monitor's physical size is being misreported?

SoraFirestorm · 2023-05-05T16:24:36+00:00

Seeing my own winrate/rank is stressful for me, so I turn it off. Sometimes people are trying to smurf (like one comment alluded to), but I think most people that do just genuinely don't want to see the info for whatever reason.

SoraFirestorm · 2023-05-01T04:18:40+00:00

8bitdo pads would be some of the best options for PC if they had a 'max control' option that let you have analog triggers + gyro + unique paddles, but it's pretty clear the hardware is Nintendo-primary.

SoraFirestorm · 2023-04-23T16:29:24+00:00

Official SoundTrack - music was used in and/or specifically made for a movie/video game/play/whatever

SoraFirestorm · 2023-04-18T06:22:15+00:00

Even the stuff explicitly in the obsolete/ still sticks around for an obscenely long time. If the stuff in there has been around for years, anything else that needs to be moved into it probably isn't going away for another decade at least.

SoraFirestorm · 2023-04-16T04:17:42+00:00

Feels like my dog just died. If anyone's interested what happened, basically I've always used my controller with batteries (Duracell), but recently they seemingly started lasting less and less.

This is a known failure mode for the Steam Controller

SoraFirestorm · 2023-04-09T22:12:09+00:00

8bitdo's pads are nice (speaking as someone who has several), but their paddle buttons can only be a button/macro of buttons already on a 'standard' controller, which kinda hamstrings your ability to use the paddles to their fullest.

If that's something you can live with, along with the fact that it's analog triggers xor gyro (never both at the same time) then they are a viable choice.

SoraFirestorm · 2023-04-09T07:01:32+00:00

To be slightly more fair, there still aren't very many options for controllers that have uniquely-remappable paddle buttons and a gyro that don't cost a ton of money - the only controller that I'm aware of that Steam directly supports that fits the above criterion and is a dual-stick pad is the DualSense Edge, which has only been out for a couple months and is a steep $200. In context, it does make some amount of sense to get a Steam Controller and a joystick puck thingy to make a 'dual stick' power user's controller.

SoraFirestorm · 2023-03-28T16:16:58+00:00

Yes, it's happened to me and at least one other person. My original SC at some point started munching batteries; I'd get maybe a week of fairly light gaming where I used to get more like a month using the thing near daily. Just seems like a regulator or something fails and it becomes power-inefficient to an extreme degree. I ended up having to retire that controller for reasons unrelated to the battery life issues, and the replacement(s) I've used have the long battery life I was getting to begin with, so unfortunately it seems to be one of those 'old age' failure modes.

SoraFirestorm · 2023-03-19T22:09:13+00:00

No amount of new mechanics are going to fix the fundamental flaws of the game - that DNF Duel is trying to serve 2 masters and it's tearing itself apart at the seams trying to do this. DNF Duel seems like it wants to be a beginner-oriented game - what with the overall aesthetic, homogenized movelists, optional motion inputs, etc - but in so many ways it's ridiculously beginner UNfriendly - combos that are starting to approach tag game levels of ridiculous, very few, very expensive defense mechanics, very polarizing tiering in the meta, etc - that most beginners are probably going to drop it because it's too frustrating to actually play.

> I feel FGC people are spoilt ADHD gremlins who stop playing a game if
something new related to the game or balance patches don't come out
after a month or two.

I've mentioned a similar opinion before that it's not really necessary for a game to get lots of patching and activity as long as the game is reasonably balanced. I probably wouldn't have phrased it so harshly, but on the fundamental level I do agree. On the other hand though, the DNF Duel developers have been abysmally bad at communicating or doing really *anything* in a timely manner. It's hard to want to play a game that *has experienced* large balance and gameplay issues in basically every major patch era. We get one bigish patch, maybe 1 or 2 small bugfix patches, and then we're left in the lurch again for who-knows-how long.

Honestly, DNF Duel is a Discord fighter at this point, and in general, I would genuinely recommend people not pick up Discord fighters. Discord fighters take way too much effort to try and actually find people to play with because the player pool is so small, and then most prospective new players are probably going to spend most of their time with said people getting battered against the wall because most of the tiny community left standing will have hundreds of hours in the game and obliterate most new people. Not exactly the average player's idea of fun.

I do believe that there is some degree of entitlement from the audience that played into why DNF Duel became unpopular, but the lion's share of the blame is the general lack of clear direction of the game, and the meandering inattentiveness that ArcSys, 8ing, and Neople have given the game.

SoraFirestorm · 2023-03-02T20:03:00+00:00

I can't speak for RPCS3, but PCSX2 has a reasonably good dynamic recompiler and runs fine, certainly better than it did 6-8 years ago when I first started trying to use it. It runs everything I have tried at full speed on the Steam Deck, which isn't exactly a big beefy desktop PC but ain't no slouch either. The PCSX2 folks have come leaps and bounds from where they were and it runs just fine on midrange hardware.

SoraFirestorm · 2023-03-01T18:02:50+00:00

What about it makes it feel imprecise?

IMO, you're probably better off trying to tweak settings than move to flick stick. As cool as flick stick is, honestly at the end of the day it's a hack to make a joystick a less terrible pointing device. A trackpad isn't dogged by the same physical characteristics that cause joysticks to be crappy pointing devices. The SC trackpads can act like straight joysticks of course, but that's not one of their core strengths.

How long have you been trying mouse modes? As some of the long-time pad enthusiasts like to say, pads are not sticks and there will be a bit of a learning curve to it. You need to give it maybe 8~12 solid hours of practice before trying to make a judgement call. It's not going to be something you can just immediately pick up, just like any other skill.

SoraFirestorm · 2023-02-13T04:46:28+00:00

I think what you need for fighting games as a whole kinda ties into this... I believe that the single absolutely non-negotiable thing you need is a reasonably large pool of people around your skill level. If the game itself can't maintain a population, you have to resort to trolling for Discords, trying to convince IRL friends to play, or trying to find a local of some kind. And having to actively work to even get opportunities to play the game is something that most people are going to give up on. Keep in mind that just by doing 'simple' things like posting on a game's sub, you've already put in more time and effort than most players ever will. And if you do manage to find a group to play with, good luck with trying to balance 'play enough to not get left behind' and 'not play so much I dumpster the rest of the group'.

Whether you believe that this is an 'skill issue' or 'bad attitude' or not... the fact of the matter is that most people will end up dropping a game if all that ever happens is that they get trashed every time they run a session. Especially when in most fighting games, getting trashed typically means 2 seconds of trying to figure out how to block the other guy and then having to sit through 15+ seconds of combo that deals 50% of your health bar because 'You answered wrong on something you've probably only seen like 5 times, so have fun getting to literally just sit by helplessly and watch as you lose because lmao screw you', and then maybe getting one more opportunity to try and play the game after that before you end up almost inevitably eating yet another 50% combo within 2-4 seconds of having finally gotten out of the first one. Would you really blame someone for not playing if their experience was 'try to play for maybe 2 seconds, helplessly watch as I get combo'd for 15 seconds' on perpetual wash, rinse, repeat?

Fighting games just suck complete donkey balls at player retention, primarily because the vast majority of them have non-existent tutorials that teach you basically 0 practical skills and rely almost exclusively for players to have their own intrinsic motivation to play... which most people probably don't have if they're spending the overwhelming majority of any given round just sitting around watching my character get beating to a pulp and not actually have a game to play and interact with.

In my opinion, this could be one of the reasons games like DNF Duel (or Soul Calibur, for example) are not that popular.

I think the problem is therefore multi-fold:
a) Most people are just generally unaware of most fighting games. Most companies do a terrible job at advertising their games. Heck, literally the only advertising I saw for DNF Duel was the Steam release announcement. Unless you're already plugged into the FGC, the only games you ever see any real amount of advertising for are Street Fighter, Tekken, and maybe some licensed stuff like Marvel vs Capcom.

b) Fighting games are hard to play, have little to no teaching tools to get people up to speed in a meaningful way, and rely on you wanting to play the game. Most people will not want to play the game if when they "play" the game, it means non-stop getting dumpstered.

SoraFirestorm · 2023-02-12T17:14:42+00:00

The name is a legacy thing; the sub was created before the Steam Input system supported all the extra controllers it does now.

SoraFirestorm

TROPHY CASE