「The Steam Deck Masterclass Vol 5 - Steam Deck Plugins with Decky」

as is the steam deck is fully featured and valve still continues to add brand new features to the steam deck experience but what if you want more features well thankfully we have a plug-in engine for the steam deck known as Dei the best way to customize your experience welcome back to the steam deck masterclass Volume 5 I'm going to cover one of the most beneficial and one of the most essential steam deck mods Dei is a plug-in engine or frame workor that allows you to essentially install plugins onto your steam deck these plugins are specifically designed for game mode giving game mode more functionality that it otherwise wouldn't have Dei is compatible with both the steam deck LCD and the steam deck OLED in theory plugins should be identical between both LCD and OLED steam decks though given that the steam deck OLED is basically an entirely different Hardware segment your mileage may vary with some plugins and if you like this video please like And subscribe and spread the Good gospel of Hightech lowlife I've also got a Discord server too if you'd like to join so the developers of Dei recommend that you have a keyboard and mouse but even without a keyboard and mouse you can use the steamex onscreen keyboard there are actually two different methods of installing Dei and we will be covering both but yes to begin you will need to go into desktop mode just pull out the power menu and press switch to desktop and you should be in desktop mode automatically the easiest and most user friendly way to install Dei is to go on their website press the download button to download the executable file it should be a desktop file and then run the installer if you set an admin password you need to put it in but if you don't have one set up Dei will offer to temporarily set your password a decky and then remove the password afterwards you can then choose release or pre-release for most users I would select release as it's more stable than pre-release and then you're done you will then need to switch the game mode if it doesn't show up immediately you may need to restart your steam deck entirely alternatively if you're an advanced Linux user that knows how to use a command line you can use a command they provide uninstalling Dei is just as easy you have to run the installer file once again now it'll give you the option to either uninstall Dei or totally wipe Dei and all the configurations from your device so now that we've covered both installing and uninstalling the Dei framework it's time to talk about how to actually get plugin set up so once you're back in game mode you will want to press the quick access menu button and you'll notice there's a new tab in the quick access menu it kind of looks like a plug and this right here is the Dey menu and from here you can access Dei settings or access the Dei plug-in store so why don't we go check out the Dei settings page here you can check for updates for Dei you can also change what update Branch you want whether it's stable or beta or even stable and beta for the store itself you've got notification options you've got developer mode and you've got an about page you can even manage plugins themselves you can manage the plugins directly in the plug-in page you can reinstall the plugins you can uninstall the plugins restart the plugins heck you can even hide them from the quick access menu so desired now let's talk about the decki store itself inside the store are a number of different plugins about 62 as of the making of this video here you'll see plugins you'll see the developer and you'll see what the plugins are meant to do you can even choose what version of the plugins to install all in all yes there are quite a few plugins so once you found a Plugin or two or 10 or so that you want to install all you have to do is press the install button and you'll see the plugin show up you can repeat this for as many plugins as you'd like so there you go you've now successfully downloaded and installed the decky framework you've also downloaded and installed some plugins now it's time to cover specific plugins plugins that I think everyone that downloads Dei should have for the sake of brevity and also video length I'm just just going to mention 10 plugins you should download and tell you what they do so without further Ado let's begin then the first plugin I want to talk about is CSS loader CSS loader allows you to modify the look of the steam deck interface the steam deck interface as a whole is built on chromium using CSS you can modify how the steam deck looks and feels but if you're not familiar with CSS stylesheets you can download themes directly from the plugin itself you can even mix and match specific themes in fact some themes are comprised of multiple smaller parts you can customize the steam deck to your heart's content and I got to say I'm quite satisfied with how this looks another plugin to customize your steam deck is of course audio loader audio loader does two things one it can change your default steam UI sounds this is what your steam deck normally sounds like and yes you can change them out that's right your ears don't deceive you those were Nintendo switch sounds the plugin can also download different sound packs many of which are from other systems but some of these sound packs are from games I've even made a sound pack based on Valhalla cyberpunk bartending Action Audio loader can also load up background music the background music plays when you're in the menu and it pauses when you're in game obviously the official deck themes repository for audio loader has some stipulations on music and as such copyrighted music isn't typically found on audio loader but adding your own background music is pretty easy to do so you can do it yourself if you're interested in Sharing themes for audio loader and CSS loader you can go on Deck them.com so if you've got some themes you want to share be sure to upload them there but do keep in mind that there are uploading guidelines so be sure to follow this now let's talk plugins for functionality this is a steam grid DB plugin this allows you to grabb artwork from Steam grid DB and apply them to games that you may have in your steam Library steam grid DB also has art for non- Steam games as well are you sick of having all of these non- Steam games without actual art well if someone submits art for these then guess what there are art assets ready to be used you've got capsules wide capsules Heroes logos and icons I've actually covered this in a prior video so if you want more information about this particular plug-in be sure to visit that video see this looks a lot better than not having art assets at all and as stated before you can also change the artwork on your official Steam games there's a wide variety of art styles so pick which one it suits you next up our proton DB badges these badges tell you the proton DB rating of games on Steam you can even click on the proton DB badge and it'll take you to the proton DB page for that game and you can see all the reports you can even change how the badge itself looks you can make it bigger or smaller you can even change the orientation of the badge in case the badge say for example obscures your game like for example here Halo I can't even see the Halo logo but when you change the orientation see everything's fixed you can even change the size as well overall proton DB ratings are useful at a glance it also tells you when games explicitly don't work on Steam deck like for example the finals doesn't work on Steam deck it has an anti-che issue that's why next up of course is wine seller wine seller is a plugin that can download and install various different versions of proton G Lux torpedo or box Tron all in all I think wine solar is extremely useful especially if you like proton GE but what is proton GE exactly well I'll tell you about that in a future video next up is shotti shotti does one thing it automatically copies those screenshots to your picture folder making your screenshots easy to access there's also a handy aggregate button for all of your screenshots you took before installing the plug-in and s typically steam deck screenshots are kind of difficult to access but with this plugin they're no longer hard to access and they're organized by game if you like taking screenshots this plugin is an absolute must I know I take a lot of screenshots next one is a weird one called pause games with this plugin you can manually pause games like the plugin can manually freeze the game and then manually unfreeze the game like think of it like this this is what it does and if you want to unpause it it's as simple as doing this now to be honest I haven't had any issues with doing this with multiple different games though obviously for online games I wouldn't recommend it but the plugin's one real superpower is the ability to automatically pause games when they're not in focus of course allowing you to have multiple games open as you can see here I seamlessly switched between Indie puzzle game and a major AAA game it's to my understanding though that this uses up a lot of ram but here you have a sort of pseudo Xbox quick resume setup that's I haven't truly tested out the limits of this plugin and I plan to do so in the future but for now I think it's pretty cool that I can you know play Halo and then sometimes when I get bored play a puzzle game all without having to exit out of Halo technically next up is music Control music Control is exactly what it sounds like you can use it to control music apps it works with your usual suspects and it even works with Google Chrome you can play games and have music running in the background at the same time it's not really something I do but it is something you could do next up is Dei recorder Dey Recorder's main functionality is the ability to record video Dey recorder has two modes one mode where you start the recording and then you stop it whenever you feel like it and another where you can just press Steam and start at the same time to record the last 30 seconds of your game play kind of like Nvidia Shadow play all video files saved directly in the video folder given that I have capture cards though it's not my preferred way to record games gameplay footage but it is very useful in case you're I don't know away from home or you don't have a capture card setup and on that note there is an extension called Dei file server Dei file server does one thing it sets your steam deck up as a sort of file server it's good for downloading files off of your steam deck like let's say for example some screenshots or perhaps maybe even some video clips you took with the decky recorder you can use the web interface and click on it and download it as if you were just downloading it off of the internet this plugin however is not a way to upload files to your steam deck there are other programs that can enable that functionality but nothing as convenient as this decky plugin also this decky plugin has a neat little feature where if you don't use a file server for a minute it'll automatically cut the file server off as to not accidentally expose your steam deck to public networks yeah I guess I said I would do 10 plugins but I might as well throw in two more this right here is tab Master this lets you make new tabs in your Steam Library there are multiple options you can use to create your own perfect tabs like for example right here let's say I want all of my anime games in the separate tab here's what I could do I could have this tab grab every game that has the anime tag and it would grab all anime games but let's say I want to go even further I can grab multiple different criteria to have my own specific thing like let's say I don't know anime 2D Fighters you could do that what about pixel art Rogue like fpss you could do that you don't even have to go off of steam's tagging system you can do other criteria as well if you have a large steam Library this plugin is for you and if you have multiple flat pack applications then autof flat pack is an absolute must you can update flat packs without going into desktop mode all in all there's a great number of plugins that I didn't cover for a wide variety of reasons like deck MTP one of my favorite steam deck plugins from the past deck MTP currently doesn't work in newer versions of Steam OS and quite frankly it's not worth staying on a lower version of Steam OS to be able to use deck MTP there's also decki Cloud save for games that don't have Cloud support that said I've yet to set it up and I probably will be doing so in a future video there's also one curious one called cheat deck cheat deck is what it sounds like it lets you essentially launch an executable alongside a steam game it's set per steam game by the way this lets you launch trainers alongside games but truth be told I'm not really much of a cheater I don't really like cheating all that much and so so I get the idea is cool and all but surely there's got to be another alternative way to use this besides you know cheating and finally reshade deck you know what's odd is that reshade deck does not work on my steam deck OLED screen and I don't know why it just displays a black screen when I try to play it but when recording the footage when I you know have it displayed to OBS it works just fine and I can even see the game Reet deck does work in a specific use case but for me it doesn't work when handheld so I can't recommend it not yet at least deck plugins are always in a state of change and due to how fast the steam deck updates decki plugins must update just as fast to keep up Dei plugins are very promising and there are times when valve releases steam deck updates that introduce a feature that was first found in a decky plug-in per game performance settings was one such feature so even if you're not totally interested in installing de on your steam deck it's 100% worth paying attention to what these guys do because who knows maybe there's a widely successful Dei plugin that'll become an official Steam OS feature in the future who knows if you like this video please press the like button and check out our other videos and if you like those other videos as well be sure to press the Subscribe button and share the good Gospel of Hightech low life with your friends furthermore we have a community Discord for enlightened individuals such as you and if you wish to further support high-tech low life be sure to check out our patreon page links in the description

Channel: Hi-Tech Lo-Life

Views: 17,999

Keywords: Gaming, Tech, Reviews, Game, Hi, Hi-Tech, High Tech, Hi Tech, High-Tech, high, tech, Low, Lo, Lo-Life, lo, low, low life, Low Life, Lo Life, Technology, Keyboard, Consoles, Computers, Computer, Steam Deck, Steam, PC, Deck, grimguardians

Id: arDK1SCwTLk

Length: 14min 25sec (865 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 04 2024