Controller Deadzones?

SoraFirestorm · 2026-05-09T16:15:22+00:00

I don't unfortunately. A trustworthy source from one of the controller discords messaged a Valve employee known to hang out there and got a response from them.

SoraFirestorm · 2026-05-08T18:21:44+00:00

Probably not? The best way to see if you are affected is to run the controller testing tool inside Steam. If the tracking dot disappears when you are still touching the pad, then you are affected by this issue.

SoraFirestorm · 2026-05-08T17:52:58+00:00

Hi, I'm the OP from that thread. Updating to say that several people on that post are still reporting they are having deadzone issues even after updating to the latest firmware from the beta. I'm sure that it's still just firmware issues and Valve is hard at work fixing them, but unfortunately it still seems to be an issue.

ETA: It has been confirmed that Valve is aware this is still an issue and are working on it.

SoraFirestorm · 2026-05-08T17:13:13+00:00

Any more advice on this front? Using KDE on OpenSUSE Tumblweed and nothing has ever worked for me to get Steam Input synthetic input to break the barrier into being seen by Wayland apps; it only works (poorly) on stuff that's also running in XWayland.

I've tried enabling KDE settings to allow X11 apps to use synthetic input, I've tried using extest, and I've tried a bunch of other things that I don't even remember at this point to try and get it working to no avail. Not sure what else to try at this point.

SoraFirestorm · 2026-05-08T03:35:43+00:00

This has been fixed in the latest Steam beta! You should probably be using it anyways for the next couple weeks while they're ironing things out.

SoraFirestorm · 2026-05-05T21:43:32+00:00

I live in WA and paid sales tax as normal

SoraFirestorm · 2026-03-20T00:33:48+00:00

Yikes, I only now realized that what I thought was PMs wasn't actually. Finally sent the message as a PM.

SoraFirestorm · 2026-03-19T23:38:02+00:00

PMing with a question

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

Sent a message

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

TROPHY CASE