Valve Details All The Improvements Coming To Steam Controller And Reveals Making Of Vid

The Steam Controller might not have arrived with the massive splash Valve were perhaps hoping for, but in the month since its launch they’ve continued to push out updates and tweaks at an impressive rate. Working with the feedback from thousands of gamers who’ve picked a Steam Controller up, Valve is attempting to address all the problems from a software level.
What’s interesting is how the hive mind of gamers have thought of new additions which Valve hadn’t dreamt up during its years of development, including using gyro-aiming for superb accuracy, and adding a new mouse-like joystick mode at the behest of a NeoGAF user. This is a far superior method of emulating camera control, and makes it feel like you’re aiming with a mouse in third-person games. Valve’s plans don’t end there either, with a news update revealing everything that it’s got lined up for the Steam Controller in the coming months.
One of the neater things Valve has just added is Steam Controller Mouse Regions. This means you can map the entire trackpad to a smaller region on the screen, with the Torchlight II example below showing how you can use it to replace mouse movement.
A fully customisable Touch Menu has also been added, allowing you to configure up to 16 different functions a single button. It looks like it could be great for menu-heavy games, so you don’t need a button each for Inventory, Skills, Stats, Map, Journal, etc.
The next Steam Beta client update will be adding support for non-Steam games. At the moment you can add in the executables and create your own controller profiles, but there’s no way to share configs with other users. With this update Steam will automatically detect the game and match if up with control configurations other users have published.
Lastly Valve has also just added a controller HUD. One of my main bugbears with the Steam Controller was wrapping my head around all the different buttons and what they were doing. Not many games at all give you native on-screen prompts. This new overlay lets you know exactly what input your button press correspond to on mouse and keyboard, which should make learning the ropes of a new game far easier.
Lastly, and I found this totally awesome,Valve put out a new video showing how the Steam Controller was built. It’s short but sweet and well worth watching, giving a great indicator of just how big a task it was for Valve to get into the hardware business. It really helps that it reminds me of the opening sequence of Short Circuit as well. Check out 54 seconds in as well, the robots even have the Aperture Science logo on them.

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