🚀 go-pugleaf

Am 09.11.15 um 22:47 schrieb Rin Stowleigh:
> On Mon, 9 Nov 2015 11:03:53 +0100, Werner Punz <we...@gmx.at> wrote:
>
>> Also for Brothers I probably have to fiddle around with the right
>> mousepads sensitivity a little bit. It seems to be set a little bit to
>> low for my taste (the game is one of the few which uses both joysticks
>> as integral part of the gameplay to control two characters separately at
>> the same time)
>>
>> It will be interesting to see how the controller will scale on non
>> controller based genres, like point and click adventure games and on the
>> controller based ones with some adjusted settings.
>
> This was always the issue I had with any sort of gamepad or controller
> on the PC before the advent of the 360 controller for Windows.
>
> The controller itself did what it was supposed to do, and the games
> did what they were supposed to do, and the OS did what it was supposed
> to do -- but they were never all three on the same page.  Sometimes it
> was plug-and-go and the game worked great.  Other times things needed
> to be remapped or calibrated, sensitivity or dead-zones adjusted, etc.

Well thats exactly the same with the Steam controller. Well not quite. I 
gave it an extensive three hour testrun yesterday. And for what it has 
to do I am now very happy with it. My main goal is to open my couch for 
non controller games. And at least for the games I played it worked 
fine. The only exception was Trine 2 where I really had to unlearn old 
habits regarding the right joystick and had to relearn how to use it.


Anyway here it goes.

Controller based games (mostly third person). You can play them 
basically out of the box as you are used to. Only downside is you have 
to learn to cope with a joystick emulation on the right touchpad. I did 
not have a problem with it, I am used to such things on the ipad.
Either way by altering the sensitivity and dead zones, you can improve 
the experience. Dead zones basically are pointless with this controller 
due to non existent drift.

The controller however really starts to shine on those games if you are 
able to map the right joystick to trackball (did not really care about a 
pure mouse input) mode. This is way better than pure joystick and way 
better than what you would get on a normal gamepad. The camera control 
is very precise while still giving you the ability to make fast 
movements. Will you get a better control than with a mouse, definitely 
no, will it be better than the average gamepad. Definitely yes.

The games I tried where this combo for gamepad and trackball mode worked 
seamlessly were Dishonored and the Witcher 3, only downside is that the 
ingame help switches instantly to keyboard if you start the trackball - 
pad and switches back to gamepad help once you press one of the gamepad 
buttons or use the left stick. Again if you use the right pad in gamepad 
stick mode this problem is gone.


Point and click adventures. Again I used a trackball mode which works 
better for the touchpad than a pure mouse mode. The games were perfectly 
playable but it needs getting used to, mouse is better, but for couch 
gaming, it is fine, played about 1 hour of those.

Text input. Now here is where I really have a problem. While highly 
praised I personally feel it is cluncky, fortunately you dont need that 
functionality often, unless you play "Her Story", like I did. Text input 
always was a pain on controllers and still is, period.

Third person control with mouse-joystick mode. Here the system tries to 
emulate a mouse/trackball while providing joystick input to the game. 
This is a hit and miss. Mostly a miss, sometimes a hit. I prefer 
traditional joystick input over that mode almost always.

Controls if you map keyboard and mouse to the gamepad. I only could get 
a small taste of it with my experiments on the right mousepad. But this 
is definitely a step up to traditional controllers.
According to reports on the net the combination of Trackball/Mouse for 
coarse grained movement and Gyroscope for fine grained aiming, seems to 
beat traditional controllers in a big way. Is it as good as a keyboard 
and mouse, no. But way better than stick based controllers.
But take this last paragraph with a grain of salt, I have yet to try 
gyro aim.

Regarding the time it needs to setup the game controls. It took me on 
the average 3-5 minutes onces I got the hang of the most important 
settings. Sometimes I used simply one of the predefined settings (which 
still lack a rating system), sometimes I did it myself.

Most of the times I just tweaked the trackball mode or joystick mode 
sensitivity a little bit and reduced the dead zones to zero (they are 
not needed due to non existent drift)

The only thing I still really have a small problem with is the placement 
and the size of the abxy buttons. The are to low for my taste and a tad 
to small. But I am getting slowly used to them.