The Valve Thread

[snowbind]

Which sounds daft to us, but that's exactly what they did with the standard rear I/O panel on motherboards. The same concept to internals seems reasonable (other than the fact they've gone with off the shelf for the beta).

I didn't know that about I/O panels. In my mind it fits within their business model, they don't have to make and manufacture everything, just establish a standard. Manufacturers could then adhere to it or not. There could be Steam parts or standard, both will work, but you might want to get the Steam part for ease. The could affiliate with company x,y and z, whose parts they tie into their upgrade system for people running that system.

[hmm]

Loving how this thread has progressed from a heady mix of tantalising hints and spiralling conspiracy theories, blurring the very boundaries of reality, to an orderly debate on the relative value and ease of maintenance of different hardware packages.

The amount of force to get a card into a virgin slot can be quite intimidating.

At least this bit was sexy though.

[snowbind]

If I am to dream, why stop at reality?

[Spacehost]

Sure, so just to come back to this. With the exception of the first in your list each of those options just become glorified consoles when you don't factor in one of PC's greatest strengths, upgradability. I think it is short-sighted to consider any scenario where Valve aren't thinking about the possibility of this becoming big and getting into a lot of peoples homes. It also plays into their idea of tiers, which seems weird for PC, unless you factor that in. If they have a system for ranking your machine, then that rank becomes static if you can't add extra parts. Adding a way to easily do that, for people who don't know how to feeds into their eco-system, retains custom, helps provide a service and helps to maintain effective scalability. Not to mention it's cost efficient, environmentally friendly and just brilliant all around. It has to come from the OS though, it has to be built in and as simple or as complex as the user requires. I mean fuck, even just thinking about it makes perfect sense. All the data they collect on hardware, the potential business partnerships.

You can have prebuilds that are upgradable surely? Homebuild -> boutique build -> mass manufacture is just like kit car -> custom car -> Ford Focus, you can still get under the bonnet and start dicking about to your heart's content.

Anyway, the internal slots of a PC are already colour-coded, and boxing up the parts is thermal suicide as well as taking up space pointlessly. PC upgradability is about as easy as it can be made without compromising the internals of a machine.

[snowbind]

You previously said it was daunting. I disagree, I think there is a middle ground. All parts are currently boxed, so it would arguably make very little difference with the correct implementation.

The car analogy is a good one though. Look at Halfords part finder and Haines manuals. I'm talking about an implementation similar to those, that ties in with the ecosystem of their tiering and rating. Establishing a standard for these to exist seems only logical.

I'd put a tenner on it steam establishing an upgrade standard within their OS and partnered with manufacturers within the next ten years.

[NecroMorrius]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=183341369&searchtext=

[NecroMorrius]

“Last week, we posted some technical specs of our first wave of Steam Machine prototypes,” said Valve spokesman Doug Lombardi. “Although the graphics hardware that we've selected for the first wave of prototypes is a variety of Nvidia cards, that is not an indication that Steam Machines are Nvidia-only. In 2014, there will be Steam Machines commercially available with graphics hardware made by AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. Valve has worked closely together with all three of these companies on optimizing their hardware for SteamOS, and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future.”

[NecroMorrius]

Controller demo! Will put in the OP.

It immediately looks more precise than thumbsticks. Impressed!

One clever function is in a mouse driven game like Papers Please, both pads control the mouse. You can combine the movement of both to move the mouse across the screen twice as fast, or twice the distance, without moving your thumb back to centre or holding it at the edge while the cursor moves at a fixed speed.

Looks like it's going to take some learning, but I'm pretty sold on this. And not just because it's Valve!

[hoot]

The accuracy looked good on the Counter Strike demo. On Portal 2, he had the movement mapped to wasd, so either you're moving or you're not, is it possible to emulate an analogue stick to control the speed of movement?

[NecroMorrius]

I'm sure it must be, yeah.

[BeeJay]

He says on the demo that the portal demo hasn't been modified for the pad, just using the standard kb+m controls.

[PK]

That looks brilliant.

I swear the mouselook pad in the Portal 2 demo is actually behaving like a trackball, isn't it? At one point he rapidly flicks his thumb across it like he's spinning a ball and the crosshair carries on moving with momentum for a bit.

Interesting times ahead!

[murray]

That video is really impressive, but is he doing all traditional face button actions (on an Xbox pad, say) using the triggers and back touchpads?

[Goose]

That looked really impressive.

[simms]

I'm so excited for this, more so than next gen console launches. I just don't want to use mouse and keyboard games anymore until I have one of these. According to that vid there will be regular updates and they are asking for suggestions on what other games people will like to see controlled.

[BeeJay]

I'm so excited for this, more so than next gen console launches. I just don't want to use mouse and keyboard games anymore until I have one of these. According to that vid there will be regular updates and they are asking for suggestions on what other games people will like to see controlled.

Got to be dota 2 surely?

[pinholestar]

It looks very impressive & precise, judging from that video. I still have my doubts regarding the haptic feedback providing a satisfactory feel for left-pad movement controls, but it appears to have cracked the problem of replicating mouse movement with a pad, that's for sure. You can see in that vid from the speed of the turning on Portal 2 & CS & the moving of the cursor to tiny buttons on Civ5 just how precise it is.

[revlob]

That video is really impressive, but is he doing all traditional face button actions (on an Xbox pad, say) using the triggers and back touchpads?

I think so, yeah. They mentioned having six independent controls available without having to move any fingers from their default positions, and especially without moving your thumbs from the pads (two buttons on each shoulder and some kind of grip triggers?). It's very atypical, but placing your primary functions on these controls reserves your thumbs for movement, so you don't have to choose between changing your look direction and jumping and firing, for example.

[NecroMorrius]

You can see him click the right pad in to pick up the cube and press buttons

[Simmy]

Is there an ETA for the controller? I play on the sofa, and playing BF4 with an XBox controller on PC is horrible

[NecroMorrius]

Apparently the way the controller works is that it feels a bit like two imaginary trackballs (clippa, all is forgiven) which are "too big" for the pad. You can push them around with your thumbs, moving your thumbs to the edge of the surface for a fixed scroll. You can also push them in, of course. Or split each one into quadrants for four different buttons. The haptics "tick" as the imaginary trackballs move, ever so slightly, so you know that they're moving and how far the travel has gone. The illusion that you're moving something physical is apparently uncanny. But, here's the fucking cool bit, if you flick your thumb in a direction and take it off entirely, the imaginary trackball keeps spinning, ticking as it goes, with the ticking slowing down as the totally imaginary trackball begins to decelerate.

I've seen a few comments about "not as good as mouse and keyboard", which is moronic. As long as the pad can play gamepad games as well as a 360 pad (or at least well enough), it's achieved parity with the competition. I suspect it'll be better for driving games, FPS etc, due to the added accuracy. But the point is, you can then adapt if further and use it to control all sorts of games which simply don't work on a pad for one reason or another. There might be a steep learning curve, but I'm betting you could get Dota 2 to work on this thing if you sat down and really thought about it. You'd probably have to use the physical buttons as modifiers and the trackpads combined into a single mouse (like Papers Please in that video) and then use the modifiers to switch between your skills, which would work by pressing the trackpads in at different quadrants. There's no problem with dragging, you simply press one trackpad and move the other. I can't wait to see if they're crazy enough to attempt it.

[mushashi]

Looks like Valve have cracked the M/KB emulation problem, a viable substitute for situations where you can't use M/KB, so living rooms (for which it was designed) and laptops basically. Still wouldn't expect somebody wielding one of these to outperform in a competitive FPS against M/KB.

[wretcherd]

Best bit of the video was the box fling in Portal. Something you can't do with the console version, even if it's not essential to gameplay.

If I ever got my hands on the controller the first thing I would try is throwing a small object in the air and catching it in Half Life 2.

Edit: just realised that even my subconscious doesn't think HL3 will be out anytime soon.

[simms]

Reading feedback on GAF there seems to be concerns from the mouse/k brigade that especially in the Civ 5 steam controller demo there is a lot of thumb lifting to get to opposing ends. The counter to this would be to increase sensitivity but then surely aiming may become unwieldy. Wonder if the answer to this would be to configure the outer part to be high sensitivity and the middle to be lower to unable more smaller precise movements. Would that work or can the trackpad even be carved up into different sections like this or only by quadrants?

[Liamness]

I suppose you could set it up to control mouse velocity instead of movement. So then you'd basically be using the typical setup for controlling an onscreen pointer using thumbsticks, except it'd be quite a bit more accurate. Maybe there could be a 'dead zone' of sorts in the middle where movements are 1:1, but if you hold your thumb at the edge it'll keep moving in that direction? That would be a unique control paradigm, impossible with a mouse and impossible with a thumbstick, and possibly better than both.

[NecroMorrius]

Reading feedback on GAF there seems to be concerns from the mouse/k brigade that especially in the Civ 5 steam controller demo there is a lot of thumb lifting to get to opposing ends. The counter to this would be to increase sensitivity but then surely aiming may become unwieldy. Wonder if the answer to this would be to configure the outer part to be high sensitivity and the middle to be lower to unable more smaller precise movements. Would that work or can the trackpad even be carved up into different sections like this or only by quadrants?

You can use both pads at once to double the speed/distance the mouse moves. Alternatively, you flick and the mouse keeps moving, as described above. Or thirdly you hold at the edge to move the mouse at a static speed. You can have all three of these active at once

[Massive Invisible Dog]

I figured the best way would be to have one one of them on really high sensitivity for moving large distances and the other on a lower sensitivity for more precise movement.

[NecroMorrius]

Yeah, that could work. It's all 100% reconfigurable, either by yourself or via downloaded control schemes. So you could do either

[Retroid]

It looks good but I want to see some top level play, give the pad to a top TF2 player and lets see some Rocket jumping maps get rocked and I think that'd prove just how good the controller is.

(Completely impossible with the 360 controller.)

[Hass]

I've never played TF, but am I right in thinking that that guy has a no damage mod on? I would have thought planting a rocket at your feet that many times would have resulted in some gibbage...