Building The Steam Controller ‘Behind The Scenes’

Valve released a new video showcasing how the robots bring the Steam Controller to life.

“When we first started designing hardware at Valve, we decided we wanted to try and do the manufacturing as well.

To achieve our goal of a flexible controller, we felt it was important to have a similar amount of flexibility in our manufacturing process, and that meant looking into automated assembly lines.

It turns out that most consumer hardware of this kind still has humans involved in stages throughout manufacturing, but we kind of went overboard, and built one of the largest fully automated assembly lines in the US.

Our film crew recently put together a video of that assembly line, showcasing exactly why robots are awesome.”

The Steam controller has been available for about a month now and Valve gives a update on how they are working to add new features to the controller.

Here are the highlights of the update:

Gyro
One of the community’s biggest discoveries was how well FPS aiming worked when you combined trackpad and gyro input. Relying on the trackpad for large scale turns, and the gyro for fine tuning, community members found they were much more competitive than they were expecting.

Gyro support for leaning makes it easy to naturally lean around corners simply by tilting your controller.

Mouse-Like Joystick mode
Many games with full controller support expect a joystick for camera control, but PC gamers like their mouse for good reason. We did ship with a method for emulating joystick cameras, but thanks to NEOGAF user mntorankusu’s suggestion, we now have a much superior method, such that it feels like you’re aiming with a mouse when playing a first or third person game.

Some games don’t support simultaneous mouse and gamepad input. With Mouse-Like Joystick you can play with gamepad input and still enjoy mouse accuracy.

Mouse Regions
Many PC RTS & RPG games have complex on-screen UI for minimaps, spell bars, inventory slots, and so on. To make it easier to rapidly navigate them, we added Mouse Regions, a configurable way of mapping an entire trackpad to a region on-screen.

For example, when holding a grip button, you can make your left trackpad map to the minimap, so it’s easy to move your camera around the whole map.

Touch Menu
Some games have hotkeys that are infrequently used, but you still want to have at your fingertips. We added the Touch Menu, a fully configurable UI with up to 16 buttons, allowing you to select your desired hotkey on a single trackpad.

Consolidate all those RPG hotkeys into a single, easy-to-use menu.

Non-Steam Game support
Another thing the community has asked for is the ability to share configurations for games bought somewhere other than Steam. The next Steam Beta client will add that as well, so add your favorite non-Steam game to your library, and we’ll automatically find configurations that other users have published.

• Available in next Steam Beta client

More details here.