not to brag and all...

[Cooljerk]

But lookie what I got at steam dev days

[Yuber]

Nice. I know you've mentioned them before, but what are some of the projects you're working on? The posts you made earlier about your projects are buried DEEP within your VR thread.(that I derailed) Sorry about that dude; I promise not to derail your gay little bragging thread

[Noxious Ninja]

Man, I would love to have just one Brix Pro.

[Cooljerk]

Nice. I know you've mentioned them before, but what are some of the projects you're working on? The posts you made earlier about your projects are buried DEEP within your VR thread.(that I derailed) Sorry about that dude; I promise not to derail your gay little bragging thread

I'm currently a part of the Half Life 2 VR mod team

[adventure_of_link]

Looks good man!!

[blackmyst]

Any impressions on the pads? Last review I read didn't have a lot of high praise for it.

[Cooljerk]

I've been playing virtually everything I can, including fighting games. The controllers are awesome. You get the functionality of a mouse with the form of a controller. Navigating the internet on the thing is especially satisfying. If you launch firefox through steam, you can even reconfigure the steam controller to work with firefox with a custom button mapping.

How's movement with the trackpad compared to say, a dpad or analog stick? Also, judging from where they are putting the buttons and dpad for later editions, would you say that'll probably be a comfortable spot?

Right now, in legacy mode, not so well. Legacy mode basically emulates a standard gamepad, mapping the cardinal directions of the touch pad with button presses. It is separated into two zones, and you can assign a modifier key past a certain point on the touchpad to emulate analog controls. For example, a little bit up on the touchpad might be "w", where a lot up would be "shift+w" where shift is the key you hold to run. The pad gives a little haptic feedback to let you know you've hit these zones, and the grooves in the touch pad let you discern which way is which.

The problems with this is that it kinda requires you to learn how to lift your thumb entirely off the pad and tap down to move. Just sliding your finger around the touchpad gets confusing and you'll find yourself constantly moving. There is supposedly a way to restrict movement until you physically press down on the touch pad (it's also a button), but I haven't found it. Super Meat Boy's creator claimed that enabling that move significantly improved the experience, basically turning the touch pad into a giant rocker d-pad. However, even then I don't think that's quite the solution.

The problem comes from you performing completely different kinds of movements with your left and right sides of your hand. On a normal gamepad, your left hand and right hand kinda control the same thing - they're controlling acceleration in very similar ways. The right hand normally controls the acceleration of the camera, and the left hand normally controls the acceleration of the character. The steam controller behaves differently. The right hand controls the position of the camera, not the acceleration. This means you find yourself making big swiping movements, capable of very fine and precise input. You expect the camera to turn every "click" you move your finger left.

The left hand behaves differently. Swiping left to right doesn't move you left to right the number of "clicks" you swipe. Doing that motion would instead accelerate you left slightly then right. It's pretty different. I saw someone compare it to patting your head and rubbing your stomach. Occasionally, you'll get your inputs switched and will try to move your character like you move your camera, or vice versa.

Now, that said, the controller is programmable within the steam API, allowing you to create unique controller inputs that aren't just keyboard and mouse presses. One idea I've seen floating around is a movement system where just touching the left pad would behave kinda like movement with a mouse, where swiping left to right would strafe you left to right the number of "clicks" you pass. Moving down to up would walk you forward the number of "clicks" you swipe up. Then, on top of that, physically pressing down on the touch pad like a d-pad in the cardinal directions would make you continue moving in that direction. This would make the left and right touch pads behave more or less the same and would provide much more precise input than a normal gamepad would allow for.

Unfortunately, since this thing is so brand new, none of this is supported yet. However, since I'm handling the movement portion of the Half-Life 2 VR mod, I might try to incorporate this controller configuration into the game in addition to Omni support.

For the record, if your impressions came from CES, those were running legacy mode and players spent maybe 15 minutes with them at the most. These controllers have a pretty big learning curve, it took me about 2 days before I stopped slip sliding all over the places. As a replacement for a mouse, they are pretty amazing. As a replacement for a d-pad, they're much more hit or miss.

[Mark57Raider]

All of this sounds pretty cool, but I don't like the idea of having to always jolt up on the joystick to have my character move in 3-Dimensional wide scope games. It seems like a waste of an idea already implemented by...can I say it here?...Sony...But since you say you're still in the works for that project it seems cool. I hope you get to develop the inputs and electronic sensors soon. Also if you take the Wii for example which had the wiimotes which was also a cool feature which combines some of the right electric analog sensory by mostly waving the right stick; i would think would work for the camera.. But using the right analog stick to position your character instead doesn't seem as good as the camera. If what you mean by tilting the left analog stick every time you wanted to walk or run a space is what you say is in development, I don't think it would be a good idea... Just saying.. Even so I didn't play Half Life, but it seems pretty cool what you are doing. Keep it up. Also the analogs look like they would seem a little slippery from what I see.

[kode54]

I see your RDK 1 headset. I want a RDK 2 headset, even if it isn't consumer ready.

[kode54]

Not to brag and all, but my Rift DK2 order has gone to "ready/processing" and charged the remainder, ahead of yours if the unofficial order tracker is accurate.

[Gil_Hamilton]

Man, I want a Rift, but I have to be all financially responsible and shit. It just doesn't fit the budget.