MudMan

There are definitely ways to send backwards compatible data when required and separately support additional features in a new iteration of an API. This wouldn’t be in the top 10 backwards compatibility challenges MS has figured out.

But in any case, I don’t care if they call it XInput2 or Game Input. I just need it to support all controller features in all games. It’s a bit hard to tell whether Game Input will ever do that, but so far it seems more concerned with acting as a layer to explicitly support a bunch of different hardware, each with its own standards, than a XInput replacement for controllers. There doesn’t seem to be a concept for a “Game Input controller” there at all, actually, just supported controllers you can listen for regardless of what they’re sending through.

I guess over time if they stick with it and it does end up working as a Steam Input-style intermediary layer that just recognizes anything you’d just ship controllers that match whatever format with gyro support and Game Input-enabled games would just pick them up fine more or less universally, but that doesn’t seem to be what it does right now, or at least not something that either games or manufacturers are relying upon.

Anyway, this was interesting and informative, but I think I’m good now. I definitely don’t want to have a conversation formatted as an argument in which nobody is disagreeing with anybody else. Those are exhausting.

That’s interesting, but considering this note:

We recommend the GameInput API for all new code, regardless of the target platform, because it provides support across all Microsoft platforms (including earlier versions of Windows) and provides superior performance versus legacy APIs.

For games developed on the GDK for Xbox One, GameInput is the only input API

I’m really not sure this would do what we both want it to do. If everybody has had a GameInput version of their controller support since last-gen and we’re still getting limited to the XInput feature set I don’t think it sorts out gyro-on-Xinput at all. I am not familiar with the behind the scenes of how modern engine controller code is handled, but this sounds like maybe it’s how games with native PS controller support are doing that, but not necessarily a new standard that will allow the default XInput PC setting of new controllers to pass gyro input to games detecting them as an XInput device. I think it’s more like MS’s answer to Steam Input as an additional layer between the games and the hardware, regardless of what the hardware is using.

It does show that all the tools are in place. MS has control over all the involved APIs. They could expand the Xbox controller API feature set tomorrow, whether or not they add the hardware feature to their base controller model. They just… don’t. And Steam could deploy a Steam-independent Steam Input driver or software to just take over all controller support on a dedicated full-feature OS layer, but they also don’t (on either Windows or Linux, as far as I can tell).

Honestly, there are enough workarounds (add games as non-Steam games, use Switch modes and so on), I just bump against the edge cases of it often because I’m both a controller and handheld nerd, so I’m stuck with a GPD Win handheld that insists on injecting their internal gyro as mouse inputs, which confuses the hell out of half the games, along with a bunch of GameSir and Gullikit controllers that do weird things with gyro, like injecting it at the firmware level instead of passing it to the OS. And I mess around with enough emulators to also end up with “oh, this was on DI mode when I booted RetroArch, so now all my buttons are in the wrong places until I quit”. It’s only dumb for like ten of us… but man, is it dumb.

Yes, I’m aware, that’s why I’m calling out it’s weird that XInput doesn’t support gyro, because we’re a long way away of it being just based on Xbox controller support and a whole bunch of other controllers with a whole bunch of other features now go through it. If MS doesn’t want to add gyro that’s up to them, but Windows supporting it natively is way overdue. Of course at that point older controllers would probably need a firmware update, but hey, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

In practice the situation we’re having is games are defaulting to Xinput and relying on Steam Input as an intermediate layer for additional features, so the end result is that gyro is… not NOT supported, but often not acknowledged at all, so you end up with a bunch of situations where you have to config gyro manually per game as a bit of a Steam-level hack, and then your controller is all wonky anywhere other than Steam because the way Switch/DI/PS input modes get picked up in non-Steam stuff can be weird.

And it gets worse in handhelds where you’re absolutely at the mercy of how the manufacturer decided to set up their controller and gyro support, and sometimes need to do a lot of weird stuff to pass it on outside of Steam.

It’s the jankiest part of controller set up left on PC gaming, and it’s all down to this weird “mom and dad aren’t talking” dance where MS keeps pretending PC controllers are fundamentally Xbox controllers at the XInput layer and Steam is the de facto curator of the controller support but has no interest (and to be frank no expectation or need) to have their controller layer work outside their launcher.

It’s hard to fault Steam’s controller layer, but I really wish they finally found a way to parse gyro data from third party controllers without having to run them on Switch mode. That goes for Microsoft and their own drivers. At this point it’s weird to keep pretending the Windows controller APIs are supposed to work on their first party Xbox controllers only.

I’m almost entirely sure that PS4 and XOne controllers did get upgrades at some points. Definitely Switch 1 ones, which matters or not depending on how you split the gens. There were definitely revisions in older controllers, though. Some were labeled and had obvious new features, some were quieter. And PC-side drivers got updates all the time, obviously.

Also, your current gen controller will also keep working indefinitely without an update. In this case Valve is annoyed about a particular dependency where THEY need the upgrade to happen for a feature compatibility thing, but the controller proper will work if you plug it in.

Hah. Shocked that you didn’t just take the easy way out and wrote “salt to taste”.

…

Please do not use recipes from AI summaries without clicking through to the correct amounts.

I mean, hell, I won’t use a recipe I find on a recipe site without cross-referencing at least a couple other recipes from other sites, because some of those are janky as hell. But the best-guess of a summarization LLM on what all those numbers and ratios are meant to be? Yeah, no. Not by itself at all, unless you’re just trying to jog your memory on something you already know and can recognize the correct values if you see them.

Eden/Azahar seem to be the current meta replacement for the newer Nintendo platforms. I wonder how much of that is a crowdfunded assessment of quality and how much is a result of modern emu communities being driven by preinstalled bundles in launchers, handhelds and install scripts (think ES-DE standards or Retrodeck/Emudeck defaults).

Either way, hey, they work fine, so… yay?

I suppose it makes more sense the less you want to do and the older your hardware is. Even when repurposing old laptops and stuff like that I find the smallest apps I’d want to run were orders of magnitude more costly than any OS overhead. This was even true that one time I got lazy and started running stuff on an older Windows machine without reinstalling the OS, so I’m guessing anything Linux-side would be fine.

After a OS update? I mean, I guess, but most things are going to be in containers anyway, right?

The last update that messed me up on any counts was Python-related and that would have got me on any distro just as well.

Once again, I get it at scale, where you have so much maintenance to manage and want to keep it to a minimum, but for home use it seems to me that being on an LTS/stable update channel would have a much bigger impact than being on a lightweight distro.

I’m sidetracking a bit, but am I alone in thinking self hosting hobbyists are way too into “lightweight and not bloated” as a value?

I mean, I get it if you have a whole data center worth of servers, but if it’s a cobbled together home server it’s probably fine, right? My current setup idles at 1.5% of its CPU and 25% of its RAM. If I turned everything off those values are close to zero and effectively trivial alongside any one of the apps I’m running in there. Surely any amount of convenience is worth the extra bloat, right?

Well, yeah, but those principles don’t typically relate to videogame companies nor to purchase habits regarding 30 year old videogames.

Voting with your wallet is ultracapitalist, self-serving non-activism people deploy performatively to make themselves feel better about stuff they don’t care that much about, not “principles”. No offense.

“Principles”? Man, is that self-indulgent.

It’s been EA since a different millenium. I think it’s time to get over it.

FWIW, the remake itself was made by an external studio including members of the original team and they apparently collaborated closely with some sort of consulting group of modders and preservation-focused community people.

It’s pretty good. Comes with both C&C and Red Alert, plus a bunch of extras. Definitely worth it.

I mean, they published Split Fiction and Tales of Kenzera this year and their Star Wars games were more than decent (let’s hear it for the atrociously underrated X-Wing revival they made with Squadrons). They also published the C&C Remaster that same year, which I feel doesn’t get enough credit despite getting a lot of credit. Probably one of the best examples of one of those in recent memory.

Let’s not be disingenuous, none of that is their bread and butter, but it’s not like they were entirely dormant.

I mean… I own both a LCD and an OLED Deck.

I would absolutely not use it as a computer without a dock and I certainly wouldn’t use it as a media player.

Other handhelds maaaaybe. The Legion Go has a stand and detachable controllers, so it could be a thing if it didn’t have the worst speakers ever devised by a human being. The GPD Win 4, the GPD Win Mini, the Ayaneo Slide and the Aya Flip all have some semblance of a keyboard, so you can get away with some stuff you can’t on the Deck or the Ally. I don’t think they make sense as a main computing device for the money, though, as they don’t have even the Deck’s low entry point as an excuse.

FWIW, the optical nub on the Win 4 is the best pointer device in any of these, and even with that and the physical keyboard I still wouldn’t use it to replace a laptop for media consumption if given the option. If I had a single device I could pick up I would sooner look into the ASUS Flow line of convertibles than into any current handheld, although you can certainly get a much cheaper all-rounder laptop than that.

Cool, so you really really wanted a handheld.

Which is fine. Go nuts. Love me a handheld.

But “the best all rounder” it definitely is not. There is a big difference between needing a dock, a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse versus just a mouse for fundamentally the same experience. If you’re into the ergonomics of a separate monitor then you’re looking for something else than “an all rounder”, you’re looking for a desktop replacement specifically. That’s not the same thing. And then I’d say the Deck still wouldn’t be how I fix that problem, honestly.

Also, FWIW, I don’t think the Deck is particularly good at anything that is not gaming. The 800p screen is not good enough for media consumption, especially given that the thing has no easy way to handle it other than gripping it with both hands. No stand, no easy way to one-hand it, tiny screen… Yeah, not how you want to watch a movie. Especially not on the LCD model, which is the only one under 500.

I agree that it’s a good cheap PC handheld. I don’t think it’s anything but that, though. If it’s the only device you can afford I genuinely don’t think it makes much sense, and in almost every other circumstance either spending more on a better desktop/laptop or splitting your budget between a cheaper work PC and a Deck is a better solution.

I think if you’re considering a Deck or a console it’s a different conversation, but as your main computing device? Yeah, no, not a recommendation from me at all.

That’s a bad use case, honestly. I mean, sure, you can do it, but… why?

The deck starts at 400 bucks (yeah, I know there’s a sale now, that’s not the base price). But that SKU comes with only 256 Gigs of storage and 16 gigs of RAM. You need a keyboard, mouse, monitor and dock to use it as a desktop PC, and now… well, it’s a desktop PC, you can’t move that set up with you to do anything other than play games.

What you want is… you know, a laptop. If you want some gaming ASUS will throw in a dedicated GPU for the price of all that loose hardware. And, you know, your keyboard and monitor can go in your backpack instead of being locked to a desk.

It’s fine if you really really want a handheld and your other tasks are a secondary concern, but if you can only afford one cheap device and you want an all-rounder to do both desktop replacement and on-the-go entertainment laptops still make the most sense.

No.

Hell no.

That’s so bad.

For one thing this was clearly written by a human and fairly decently so, as these things go. Assuming you want humans to do journalism instead of shitty corpos outsourcing it all to chatbots, it may help to engage with it as intended every now and then.

For another thing, never assume anything you see on social media exists at all. It probably doesn’t. At best it’s a slice of it selected to get a rise out of you in one way or another. Yes, including here. Algorithms didn’t come up with the notion that people react more to stuff that makes them angry. I’m not saying to touch grass, but… like, touch some astroturf at least. Find a human who has touched grass once and ask them about it. Don’t live your life mediated by social media posts, what the hell.

And if you’re going to inhabit a semiotic ecosystem that exists primarily in the dregs of cyberdystopia at the very least put the work in of either understanding what’s being thrown at you via the firehose of constant worldwide anger or… you know, not reacting to it. You really have no obligation to add to this crap.

To be clear, I was going “we suck as a species” before I realized you’re saying if someone doesn’t plagiarize or summarize the content for you then you’re not gonna read it but will still react to the version of it that pops into your head. I wasn’t even considering that level of suck to be on purpose, let alone self-righteous.

I’m gonna go not be on the Internet for a second.