sp3ctr4l
@sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Steam Controller shows signs of life, as leaker suggests that Valve has received its "first large quantity" shipments 1 week ago:
I think they actually use a setup of basically … something like minature subwoofers, but I’m not 100% sure of that.
- Comment on Steam Controller shows signs of life, as leaker suggests that Valve has received its "first large quantity" shipments 1 week ago:
Ah, you’re correct!
It quite litetally fooled me, but you are right.
- Comment on Steam Controller shows signs of life, as leaker suggests that Valve has received its "first large quantity" shipments 1 week ago:
I guess worth noting for Steam newbies:
The trackpads can be configured to act as basically any possible kind of input.
You can break them down into 4 way buttons, 8 way buttons, 2 buttons, one button… make them work as a joystick, or as a mouse… they click in a bit at multiple points…
So, if you prefer a different kind of thumbstick orientation, you can basically emulate it.
Literally all of the buttons on one of these things can be reconfigured to do a whole bunch of crazy shit, you can make macros, you can make it so that a little hud popup with scrollable selectable options pop up, you can make combos of key presses do different specific inputs, you can make a turbo function… etc.
Anything you run through Steam can be made to work this way with the Steam Input system they invented for with the Steam Deck, the Steam Controller 2.0 is basically a shrunk down Steam Deck without the PC and screen.
- Comment on Steam Controller shows signs of life, as leaker suggests that Valve has received its "first large quantity" shipments 1 week ago:
I mean, arguably… it isn’t a D Pad if its actually seperate buttons.
But anyway, with the Steam Deck, which the Steam Controller 2.0 is basically a scaled down version of, that doesn’t have the whole computer and screen… you can at least get after market uh… contact boards?
I’m not sure of the term, but like the internal platter board thing, that the dpad/abxy buttons actually physically connect to, with the trigger/switch mechanisms.
For my deck, I got a kit that replaces the original ones with ones that are much ‘clickier’, like a mechanical keyboard as compared to a membrane keyboard.
It has more tactile and also audio feedback, beyond just being more responsive… that was like $30 bucks or something?
For a while, it was the case that to do this kind of mod, you’d have to do your own solder, but I waited and eventually somebody in China somewhere started making ones that are pre-soldered, and just require an appropriate screw driver and some dexterity to install.
So… if the Steam Controller takes off, I’d say give it 6 months, and by then something similar will probably exist for it.
- Comment on Steam is adding support to show estimated FPS for your hardware before buying a game 2 weeks ago:
A neat trick you can do with heavier games on … at least an OLED Deck (not sure if this is doable on the LCD version)…
You target 45 fps, min, lock the max frame rate at something like 45-50, then, use VRR set at a 1:2 ratio, so you get 45 fps at 90hz.
In many games, this generally, at least imo, ends you up with a smoother and potentially graphically higher quality than just targeting 60 fps / 60 hz.
- Comment on Amazon hits sellers with 'fuel surcharge' as Iran war roils global energy markets 2 weeks ago:
So… its dynamic pricing, applied to their vendors.
That’s sure to be a stable paradigm.
- Comment on SteamOS 3.8.1 Preview: Second Clutch 3 weeks ago:
I am equally annoyed that it took them this long to finally get around to it, but happy that they did.
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to steamdeck@sopuli.xyz | 0 comments
- Comment on Microsoft is ending the Windows Update nightmare — and letting you pause them indefinitely 4 weeks ago:
You’d have to be an idiot to trust this.
- Comment on Microsoft is working to eliminate PC gaming's "compiling shaders" wait times 5 weeks ago:
Lol.
I am now trying to imagine like…
A torrent client, that is JIT Lua, and you just ‘stream’ the game, as you download more of it.
- Comment on Microsoft is working to eliminate PC gaming's "compiling shaders" wait times 5 weeks ago:
pulsegeek.com/…/shader-pre-caching-on-steam-deck-…
Ok, so, its kind of both:
Shader pre-caching means compiling GPU programs ahead of play to avoid on-demand stalls. On Steam Deck, the path usually includes prebuilt Vulkan pipelines distributed by Steam, plus local caches created by DXVK for DirectX 9 and 11 and by VKD3D for DirectX 12. This two tier approach mitigates runtime work and smooths frame pacing when new materials or post processing effects first appear.
…
Caches consume storage and can become stale after game patches or driver changes. When mismatches occur, the system may recompile anyway, so the saved time diminishes.
…
Shader stutter often traces to pipeline state changes that force compilation or shader specialization. With Vulkan, pipeline objects encode fixed state to avoid per draw setup, which shifts cost to creation. Pre-caching amortizes that by compiling pipelines during downloads or first launches. The effect is fewer spikes, especially during initial encounters with enemies, weather transitions, or new regions. Still, certain shaders depend on runtime constants or device specific details, which can prevent perfect reuse.
So, you may be downloading various prebuilt components, and you may be pre-caching/pre-compiling local files based off of those prebuilt components, and the game/gpu/driver.
- Comment on Microsoft is working to eliminate PC gaming's "compiling shaders" wait times 5 weeks ago:
… forty minutes?
Good lord.
I think the longest amount of time I’ve spent compiling shaders on a Steam Deck is for Cyberpunk 77, and it can’t have been much more than 5 minutes.
… Either that or trying to get a Switch emulator to properly pre-compile shaders.
But anyway: This is an unaviodable thing that has to be done when the game relies so heavily on GPU shaders.
You have to actually generate those shaders, before you can use them, and that’s gonna be specific to your hardware.
So what MSFT is doing here is just pre-compiling them for I guess … every game they offer, with every Nvidia GPU/driver update, and then having a cloud system that allows you to download them instead of compiling them on your end.
So basically its kinda like downloading a game + hardware specific driver, sort of.
Also, I… I’m not sure, but I don’t think Steam does this.
Yeah, its indicated that shader compilation is happening in the ‘Download’ section, but so are ‘File Operations’ - aka, cleaning up loose files and doing memspace management …
I am pretty sure you are just actually compiling the shaders on your own hardware, its just visualized to the user as a step in the ‘Download’ section, to get across the idea that the game isn’t ready to be played untill all those steps are complete.
Or, you can change a setting somewhere, and it just skips that step so that it isn’t part of the initial ‘Download’ process, and instead occurs the first time you hit play, or, after any game/driver update that has delta’d the shader code.
- Comment on Steam Machine update, Valve now says all three new products will ship this year (Updated) 1 month ago:
… Like, a Canon printer/photocopier?
So its just projectile vomiting generated images of the scene you likely intended to describe?
- Comment on [Deck] Make it make sense 1 month ago:
I also hate the default setting.
I changed it to uh, left thumpad moves the mouse, left thumbpad click is middle click, remap the right pad to be 4 way buttons, top and left to left click, bottom and right to right click.
Moved scroll to L2 and R2, or you could map them to up and down on a joycon, or the dpad, or L1 and R1, etc.
- Comment on Steam Deck is out of stock in the US? 2 months ago:
Valve can take the risk on doing actual innovation because they functionally have a large pool of ‘fun money’, that does not come with a board of shareholders attached to it demanding that it constantly be making next quater profits be as high as possible.
You save up that fun money fund, and when an actual good idea gets committed to, you can now actually just fund at least a moderately sized go at it.
… and, because its … you know, their money, with no shareholder or lender strings attached to it… they could fail completely, and then just eat the loss.
As opposed to now having to reorient other segments of the company to make more money to make up the difference to the board or lenders.
- Comment on Steam Deck is out of stock in the US? 2 months ago:
Valve doesn’t have utterly huge manufacturing (or warehousing) capabilities the way MSFT, Sony, or Nintendo do.
They very likely just retooled the spaces they were using for the Steam Decks over into making Machines, Frames, new Steam Controllers.
As in, they probably just entirely stopped mfging new Steam Decks like… I dunno, 3 to 9 months ago?
The RAMpocalypse certainly isn’t helping, but I’d say its much more significantly due to Valve running basically a pretty small manufacturing capability compared to other … game-device makers.
- Comment on Why $700 could be a "death sentence" for the Steam Machine 2 months ago:
Thanks for that a lot to think about
Happy to have an infodump/perapective appreciated, thank you!
=)
- Comment on Why $700 could be a "death sentence" for the Steam Machine 2 months ago:
Yes, that’s all true.
It is not just a console, it is a full-on PC.
Run your own home media mode, browse the web, make stuff in Blender, writr and compile code, etc, I do all of that regularly with my docked Steam Deck.
But I went with Mini PC rather than Steam Deck for comparison because, though it very much literally is a Steam Deck 3.0, in a lot of ways… I think its closer to a mini PC than anything else.
MiniPCs are basically small boxes often comparable to, I dunno, a large jar of pickles, in size. They… also do not have the functionality of a gamepad controller, or built in screen, as actual physical parts of them.
And they basically always have integrated cpu+mobo, RAM is usually laptop SODIMM form factor, and then either the cpu they use is actually an apu, or an npu, as opposed to laptops often having a discrete but laptop sized gpu, or full-on pcs typically having full-on gpus.
Or, its becoming more common for a mini-pc to juat be designed with either an oculink port, or a usb 4.0/tbunderbolt port, with the idea being that its a decent general purpose work pc in its own, and if you want to game on it, you get an eGPU cradle, stick a power supply and desktop GPU in it, and then connect it to the miniPC, which can then use that GPU nearly as efficiently as if it were just directly plugged into it.
- Comment on Why $700 could be a "death sentence" for the Steam Machine 2 months ago:
I am doing something similar, with a similarly old TV, and can get the render res up to 1600 x 900 for a good deal of stuff.
Can’t quite handle 1920 x 1080 though, that starts to be just generally problematic.
- Comment on Why $700 could be a "death sentence" for the Steam Machine 2 months ago:
Here’s a way to think of it:
It’s a mini-pc.
But a bit bigger.
So… yeah, even if it is expensive by console pricing standards… $600 to $1000 is actually a pretty reasonable range for comparably powerful mini-pcs.
The runor that MooresLawIsDead was initially running with was that the actual custom chip they are using was originally slated to be used in something like a new variant of a MicroSlop Surface tablet.
AMD fabbed a bunch, MicroSlop bailed on the idea, leaving AMD with a bunch of weird custom chips they don’t know wtf to do with.
Valve then goes to AMD, begins to uh, think with portals, or whatever.
- Comment on Lutris games only seeing Steamdeck as a KB+M when running games in Desktop Mode 2 months ago:
Unfortunately I have been using Bazzite so long I’m not sure exactly how to explain how to do it on SteamOS, but…
So your Deck, when Steam is still running, is also running the layer that translates your joy and buttons and track pads and what not, as managed via Steam’s controller profile system.
You can go into steam and find a button for something like a default desktop config.
You can uh, tinker with that profile and make it so a hot key or combo switches it over to just acting as basically an xbox369 controller.
When you are in that mode, Lutris, emulators run in desktop mode, etc… they should recognize your joy/trigger/button inputs as if they were a 360 controller now.
It… can be a bit confusing, but its not impossible to set up, at least not with the emulators Inhabe futzed about with.
- Comment on Days after cancelling their Linux-compatible mod loader, Nexus Mods announces that they're bringing SteamOS support to Vortex 2 months ago:
They are completely incompotent at linux and literally do not know what they are talking about
- Comment on Days after cancelling their Linux-compatible mod loader, Nexus Mods announces that they're bringing SteamOS support to Vortex 2 months ago:
Uh no it wouldnt.
Just download the mods however you would download them.
Organize them and ‘install’ them with the mod organizer, MO2, Limo, whatever.
Most torrent managers allow you to paste in a block of links to a bunch of torrents, all at once.
If you wanna release a mod collection… you just make a list that includes all the links to the mods, and then another smaller torrent that is just the load order file, or instructions for how to set up the mod manager with the load order.
Download managers for non torrents still exist.
Mega still exists.
You could set up an RSS system that does 90% of this.
I’ve been modding, making mods and shit since the 90s.
Its only fairly recently that people expect mod manager programs to handle downloading the mods and keep them up to date.
This is not necessary.
You are thinking of a mod manager as a thing that manages the downloading.
This is a fundamentally unnecessary concept, we’ve solved the problem of ‘how do i keep a bunch of files downloaded and up to date’ in a thousand different ways since dawn of the internet.
And its also a fundamentally bad idea with specifically mods, because one random change from a mod in either a collection or your own custom load order… well that can introduce cascading breakages… because almost no one who publishes a mod collection actually bothers to constantly keep sure that all updates all keep working together.
There’s no real, solid ‘maintainer’ thats constantly correctly auditing all of that, the way you have with say the curation of core linux libraries.
…this is only a catch if you want an easy button.
If you want an easy button, go pay Nexus for it.
It will break often, but it is ‘easy’, I guess.
Also I2P is an entire alternate internet standard sort of in the way Tor and onion sites are, except its basically ‘what if the entire internet was torrents, and also encrypted’.
There’s basically no way to download anything from I2P without it going through a million hops and coming from a million different people.
It solves the ‘how do we store and deliver all these files’ problem by… you set up the main site with the main copy of the file, but everyone else who also has the file can also contribute to helping anyone else download them, anyone else connected to the network helps route traffic for everyone else.
- Comment on Days after cancelling their Linux-compatible mod loader, Nexus Mods announces that they're bringing SteamOS support to Vortex 2 months ago:
I’ve been using Limo, on Bazzite, to mod Cyberpunk 2077, Kenshi, and Fallout NewVegas, on a SteamDeck, with 10s of gigs of mods for each … for 2 years now.
Yep, it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, isn’t as automated as far as auto support for paying to download 100 gig messes of modpacks that don’t work correctly, easily.
Yep, it requires a bit of learning how it works, and yep, a few particularly invasive/reconstructive/substantial mods require weird little work arounds.
But that is basically always going to be the case.
And Limo gives you all the tools you need to put in a bit of your own effort and figure out how to make things work, or identify things that just won’t work.
A mod manager cannot be an easy button, because mods by their nature are made by amateurs, are experimental, are mutually incompatible.
Trying to make a mod manager that is an easy button is a fundamentally doomed to fail idea, unless you think you can come up with a solution to handle every weird thing that ever has been or ever will be done by a modder, for every game, ever.
You would think these Nexus people would understand this automatically, having been doing what they’ve been doing for what like a decade or two now?
- Comment on Days after cancelling their Linux-compatible mod loader, Nexus Mods announces that they're bringing SteamOS support to Vortex 2 months ago:
Now that’s a good fucking idea, imo.
- Comment on Days after cancelling their Linux-compatible mod loader, Nexus Mods announces that they're bringing SteamOS support to Vortex 2 months ago:
Yeah so whats happening here is their ‘dev team’ and/or its leadership are a bunch of fucking morons.
That’s basically the only way this can happen.
Oh the project we deprecated, so that we can make a new thing that does new stuff?
Uh.
Um.
The old thing is actually better at the new stuff.
Turns out all the work we did for the last year or two was pretty much completely useless as anything other than an expensive lesson in how to fail at software development.
Whoops!
But that’s no big deal, that’s
Nothing dramatic or groundbreaking,
It’s just:
just small problems that added up over time to slow us down.
What they’re almost certainly doing is entirely giving up on figuring how any to do with linux works, and … they’re just gonna make it work through Proton.
These people are clowns.
NexusMods is to PC modding as CrunchyRoll is to Anime:
They’re a bunch of amateurs who have no idea what they’re doing, and basically just ended up being the default ‘provider’ of what they provide by accident.
They are primarily social media manager types first, everything else second or third.
Their expertise is posting on forums and aura policing, not actually getting anything done or thinking out a complex process with strategic tradeoff decisions that have to be made and stuck to.
- Comment on i cant wait to get a steam frame 3 months ago:
Only time I ever hear about him is some new really dumb thing he said/did.
I’m obviously not a fan and don’t follow him anymore, so I am biased in that way.
- Comment on i cant wait to get a steam frame 3 months ago:
Linus is such a fucking idiot, around everything around linux, that he functions as an industry plant for Microsoft.
- Comment on i cant wait to get a steam frame 3 months ago:
There’s actually a huge thing stopping corporations from buying them in bulk as workstations:
They’re only sold on Steam, directly by Valve, then shipped to you.
Just like all other Valve hardware.
You… need a Steam account.
And they can very easily just say ‘one per person!’
People need to stop with this ‘companies will buy them in bulk and fuck everything up!’ line of logic.
It makes almost 0 sense.
A company would only be able to do that by setting up a system of fraudulent accounts on Steam, which would violate the TOS individually, and potentially be quite illegal collectively.
You won’t be able to buy a new Steam Machine, at Valve’s MSRP, at Walmart, or Best Buy, or NewEgg, or MicroCenter.
You might be able eventually find some on Amazon, or Walmart’s online stores, something like that, but those will be from resellers of dubious sourcing methods, and they will be charging more than MSRP.
- Comment on Lets speculate about the steam controllers price 3 months ago:
Eh, I’m think more like $6, maybe $7.