Steam Deck Trackpad Basics

hey everyone welcome back on today's episode i'm going to be going through a few of the steam input things that you can do in order to make your gameplay experience a little more personal and a little more uh user friendly for you because a lot of times we sit down and we pick up controllers and we're we wonder what were the developers thinking when they decided to set this control this way well with steam input you can actually do almost whatever you want with a game and completely bend it to your well to make it more comfortable and usable for you if that sounds good let's get started let's start off with one of my favorite games on steam and that is chroma gun in chrome gun you have this cool gun that allows you to shoot different colors and in order to get between those different colors the developers set it up so you could use the right button which is totally fine however there's other options now that we have these track pads in the past i've always set up track pads when i'm using say my steam controller uh this one would always be camera control and this is set up for camera control and it works really good but because we have a right stick here i really don't feel like i need to have camera control there so that frees up the right pad to do other things generally devs will use the left trackpad as the d-pad but because the steam deck has a d-pad that frees up the uh left trackpad to do other things so what other things can we do well let me show you first off uh you if you hit the steam button and you push to the right on the d-pad it brings up the control layout and i'm going to hit control controller settings i guess i'm going to not touch it touch it and use the a button instead and you can see that i'm using the official layout for chroma gun however i can edit this all that i want so i'm going to come down here and go edit layout and on the left hand side you can see all of your different options i'm going to head all the way down to track pads and the right trackpad is still set up as a mouse so it's camera control but i'm not going to mess with that right now the left trackpad is direction pad what i'm going to do instead of using a direction pad i'm going to go down here all the way down until i get to a radial menu and then once i'm in radial menu i can add radial menu one two and three i can add like i think it's like 20 options here i'm obviously not going to do that many but what i'm going to do is add one two and three now the first one i'm gonna set as zero and the reason i'm setting it is zero is just so you can see what it actually does the second one i'm gonna set as one the third one i'm going to set as two and you're probably thinking why is he setting three as two and two as three like you're that's all going to make sense in just a second all right so i've got zero one two and three now if i back back out to the game if i put my finger on the touchpad on the left it brings up a radial menu and what you'll notice is that zero is in the middle and one is up here two and three now zero doesn't actually do anything so there's no reason for me to do it and i'm getting a little bit of haptic feedback when i touch that it's like saying hey there's nothing there why the first one isn't on the outside why the first one that you pick is always in the middle i don't know yet i haven't really had a chance to figure that out uh and if you know leave a comment down below and i'll make another video that explains that but on the outside we have one two and three and if i go one it selects the blue if i go to two it selects the yellow if i go to three it selects the red seems great however that that requires me to tap and push down which isn't a big deal i get a little bit of haptic feedback when i do it but i do think that there's a better way so here's what i'm going to do i'm going to go back to the steam button i'm going to go to controller settings i'm going to go over to edit layout we'll go back down to track pads and on the left trackpad i'm going to go into my settings for my radial menu now right now radial menu button type is set to click which means i have to actually depress the trackpad in order for it to do its thing so i'm going to change that from click to touch release what does that mean well it means that i can touch it i don't have to depress it and as soon as i take my finger off of it that's when it's actually going to fire that input and it won't fire that input until i release the touch input why is this important it's important because as soon as you put your finger down on the track pad it's going to be waiting for you to release and that makes sure it brings this up on screen and it makes sure that you can look down and and know that you've got the right thing selected before you let go there's other options you can set it up to release after you click it and release or you can set it to just continually fire that same button and i'll show you why you would want to do that uh actually i'll show you why you would want to do that later but i actually don't use that i think that there's better options okay now i could just go back and and do that but what i'm going to do now real quick is i'm going to go into haptics and i'm just going to turn the haptics up just a little bit and we back out to the game and now what happens is it doesn't do anything until i take my finger off of the button so you can see if you watch right here you can see that i currently have whoops i currently have yellow selected right so basically i can just tap the different areas here and switch to the different colors really really handy however i think that there's actually another way that you can do this so i'm going to hit steam i'm going to go into my controller settings i don't know why i can't just tap that it's probably because i can't i'm not looking directly down at it i'm going to go to layout we're going to go to track pads under track pads i'm going to come back down here instead of radial menu i'm going to go down to a directional swipe okay now why do i think a directional swipe is better here's why in this particular game you already have a ui element that's on the screen it shows you the the thing that you're trying to match so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to say um let's see the right button the right bumper on this cycles through them so i'm going to say up if i add a command i'll set that as the left bumper and then down i'm going to add a command as right bumper and if i go back out whoops i didn't mean to close the game there we go now what happens is if i swipe up it goes up through the pages if i swipe down it goes down through the pages and so now you don't even have that extra ui element coming up on the screen you can just say oh i'm going to swipe through and change what color that i'm using which is really really handy i think uh so that's one of the things that you can do with chroma gun let's move on to some retro games so now you can see that i've got sonic the hedgehog running on retroarch on my steam deck by the way if you want me to show you how to get your roms imported onto the steam deck leave a comment in the section down below and maybe i'll make a video about it but that's not what this is about this is about how can we utilize the touch pads in order to make our gaming experience better the cool thing about the the thing about retroarch that a lot of people will run into is that it expects you because it's a pc game to have a keyboard attached and there's no keyboard attached i mean sure i could attach a keyboard i could bring up the keyboard from the quick access menu but there's a better way to do it so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to hit steam and i'm going to open up my controller settings and once i've got those open you can see i'm using the official layout for retroarch but i'm going to edit it just a little bit and so i'll hit the edit menu and i'm going to come down to track pads and i'm going to ignore the right trackpad because i have a plan for that later on but my left trackpad i'm going to set up as a radial menu and you don't have to set it as a radial menu you have a million different options but i'm going to do a radial menu and i'm just going to do one button on the radial menu i can always add more later if i think of other things but right now i just want to set it as the f1 button the f1 button is basically bring up the retro arc menu so you can load a different rom or do a save state and you could do all of that stuff through hot keys on your track pads i don't want to do that by accident so i'm not going to do that but i do want to always have quick access to that menu so i can quickly do something all right so now that i've got that set up i'm going to set my radial menu to be a uh touch release so i'm gonna tap the screen the the track pad take my thumb off of it and it's going to work at that point i'm gonna back out of this but go back into the game and actually i'll leave it paused and now if i want to bring up my menu i just touch and release oh hold on i realized my mistake here i put it on that middle thing which i can't figure out what that middle thing is for so track pads and we're going to remove that whereas remove command and i'm going to set it as radial button 2. keyboard f1 and there we go now all i do is i i tap and it takes me in and out of the menu super super easy in order to get back to the menu all right the next thing that i want to show you is how to utilize the toggle feature as part of the track pads in order to use rewind in retroarch it's a really cool thing so first off i have to turn on rewind in retroarch you go to your main menu then under quick menu you're going to come down here until you get to rewind you're going to turn that feature on i did turn it on earlier and why it didn't save that i'm not sure it might be because i quit without saving but that's okay so now i've got that done but it's not enabled on here because the default key is the r key and i i don't have a keyboard attached to my steam deck and 99 of the time i'm not going to have a keyboard attached to my steam deck so i'm going to go into my controller settings and i'm going to edit the layout i'm going to go down to track pads and on my right trackpad i'm going to set it from a joystick to instead be a radial menu and i'm going to set this up as the r key you can see that i actually tried this earlier but that was actually a part of a right stick click or a right pad click and i don't want that so i'm going to remove that command and i'm going to come down to one of my radial buttons i'm going to set it to the keyboard of r now i got to go for some reason it jumps down to my left trackpad and i don't want to do that so i'm going to go all the way back up to my right trackpad and why am i using a radial menu here well because i could put other commands on here as well now the issue with this is it's a touchpad right and so when i touch the touchpad it's going to send that signal but then it's going to stop real quick and the way that rewind works in retro arc is it's expecting you to hold down the rewind button r on your keyboard until you don't want to rewind anymore and then take your finger off of it so how do you do that well you're going to go to this little gear and then under settings scroll down and you're going to set it to a toggle so you're going to click on that little button to have it be a toggle instead of whatever else it is all right now i'm going to go to the menu button 3 and i'm going to set that to be the i key why am i using the i key here's the reason oh i gotta push back up the reason why i want to do the i key is for fast forwarding so let's say you're playing i don't know a a an old jrpg and there's tons and tons of talky talky talk and they didn't give you a way to make the text go faster well you could use the fast forward button in order to get past that chatting faster or let's say you're playing a jrpg and you're waiting for a mod like you're trying to grind to get more powerful before you go up against the end boss you turn on fast forward and maybe those fights happen a lot faster that kind of thing i'm not going to use that in sonic the hedgehog but i figured i'd set it up now anyway and i'm gonna set this as you guessed it a toggle so i can hit the button and turn it off okay so now that i've got that set up i'm gonna back out and just let me go into my quick menu real quick and see if i have to turn anything else on um all right i think we're good so um let me close this i'm gonna play a little bit of sonic the hedgehog grab some rings bumped into that guy oh no i got the rings back i just missed a bunch of rings i just missed that little tv back there that's okay i'm not doing too bad and you can see everything's working just fine as i go loop-de-loop but i decide that i want to go back after this maybe i i came all the way down here and i i ran into something and it it cost me all those rings well that's okay i'm just gonna hit rewind and now it's rewinding it's going to go backwards and then i'm going to go right back into playing and we've rewound and everything's fine so that's how you could use the track pads to get to menu items that you otherwise wouldn't have because you don't have a keyboard attached to your steam deck all right let's move into final fantasy 7 and let me or not seven final fantasy 14 and i'll show you how you can set it up so that you can use the joystick as your camera controls or the um touchpad as the camera controls it's up to you okay so here i've got final fantasy 14 loaded up one of my favorite mmos of all time and one of the things that somebody had asked is can you control the the camera with the joystick and with the uh track pad and you can the problem is is that it's really slow on the trackpad because it's acting like a joystick and some games will allow the joystick to work just fine as the trackpad and other games won't final fantasy 14 happens to be one of those games so what's the solution well the solution is to come in here and use the steam button i'm going to open up my settings i'm going to go over to edit layout i'm going to come all the way down to track pads and my right trackpad is set as a joystick well i'm going to set it to move as a mouse instead and then i back out but now it's moving the mouse around and not actually controlling the camera so what do you do well you're going to add a second command to that that layout under the track pads i'm going to come down here and it's not going to be click it's going to be under touch and under touch i'm going to set it to be a mouse right click so basically what's happening is you are holding down the right click button on your mouse and dragging it around when you touch the trackpad now it is much much more responsive and much easier to use on top of that you can also set the the actual click to be something if you want but right now that's really really responsive so if i'm playing and i want to spin my my uh my camera around real fast i can do that or i can just use the joystick now the joystick actually because this is such a slow paced game with your joystick it actually works pretty well but if you want to use that right the um the right trackpad in order to be your camera control you absolutely can now something that somebody else might ask is can i also set it up so that gyro works and you absolutely can i go into edit layout i'm going to come down to gyro right now it's set to none i'm going to set it as uh as mouse and sure enough it works all i have to do is move this around when my thumb is on the trackpad and everything's fine i take my thumb off the trackpad it doesn't work anymore but then if i want to control the mouse itself i can just do that with my thumb on the thumbstick the options that you have when it comes to deciding how you want to control your game are absolutely limitless now there's a lot more that i could go into with controlling steam input on the steam deck and i absolutely will in the future so make sure that you subscribe and do all of those things because i've got a lot more things to show you on here anyway thanks for watching i'll see you guys on the next one stay awesome everyone

Channel: NerdNest

Views: 91,287

Keywords: video game news

Id: prK24ojMGK4

Length: 18min 5sec (1085 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 28 2022