Steam Deck

Previously the hall effect joysticks were only available for the LCD deck

FINALLY! I'm super fucking stoked but I'm also super fucking overwhelmed. There's so much more to this game than I thought, and I have no idea how things work but God DAMN do I love it!

This guy is a racing game Youtuber, so I was surprised to see him create a video about the steam deck. Are there any other racing games you would put on the list?

It switched from the standalone version of EAC to Epic Online Services anticheat instead, breaking steam deck support in the process.

However, EOS is normally supported on Steam Deck, so this is probably a temporary issue and will hopefully be resolved by either Valve or Respawn/Epic. We'll just have to wait and see.

Edit: this is reportedly now fixed on proton experimental

Cataclysm DDA, Vim & WASD - Implications For Generalist Translations Of Qwerty Layouts To The Steam Deck

link to video demonstration on Peertube instance

Steam Deck controller config available by renaming Cataclysm DDA in your steam library (added as a non-steam game) to Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and then searching under community layouts for "Cataclysm DDA full keyboard mapping".

edit: I recommend increasing the transparency of the popup steam menus by a large amount in practice, I kept them fairly opaque to make the video demonstration easier to follow

Here is my setup!

Vim Ring - my preference -> left joystick (no reason these can't be shuffled around tho)

The Vim hjkl keys (along with the diagonals y u n b because this is CDDA and we need those diagonals) provide us with a clear idea we can ground the Steam Deck mapping in, and unlike a Vimmer with a qwerty keyboard, we can unfold the keys into the navigational ring (up down left right) Vimmer's imagine in their head to understand Vim qwerty controls.

Not only does this provide an easy way to remember our first choice in dividing the qwerty keyboard into Steam Deck mappings, it also means that the control scheme has plug and play compatibility with a dizzying array of software and games that all are part of Vim's ~40 year tradition and evolution of keyboard controls. Once you memorize the Vim Ring on your Steam Deck you will be able to use it for the rest of your life on joysticks and touchpads, and you can rest assured that other people will be developing vim hjkl based controls for software and games for the rest of your life.

WASD Ring - my preference -> left trackpad

WASD is probably one of the most well known "conceptual projections" onto the qwerty keyboard right?

It might seem a bittt confusing at first that z and x are the diagonals, but if you remember that this navigational ring is based on WASD, than s has to be down, and thus it becomes intuitive that z and x would be the downward diagonals. The letters q and e are almost without fail where left-lean, right-lean controls are for tactical shooters (for leaning out of cover to shoot) but even to someone unfamiliar with these control schemes, q and e are pretty intuitive.

Center Column

Notice here, that between the Vim and WASD rings is 2x3 column of unbound letters on the keyboard, those being c v, f g, and r t. The natural place for these letters which are frequently used by games and software is the four Steam Deck back buttons L5, R5, L4, R4 and the bumpers R1 and L1. True, vim prioritizes the horizontal home row, but given the accessibility of the other homerow keys in the VIM and WASD rings I don't think this is a serious flaw especially because it is easy to visualize how this column maps to your Steam Deck.

Number Ring - my preference -> right trackpad

Now for our last navigational ring. This ring was inspired by reading about players admitting to making the extremely chaotic-neutral choice of using the number row rather than the numberpad for navigation lol. We could just recreate the numberpad in a menu, but we already have two rings, and if anything nudging the numberpad into a ring shape makes activation from a touchpad or a joystick much more intuitive, it also expresses directly the meaning of the numberpad in terms of navigation while allowing quick access to each number for rapid input. Importantly, the number row keys not the numberpad keys are used here so that in conjunction with shift this ring can be used to activate the alt number row commands !@#$%^&*().

Caboose Board - my preference -> right joystick

The Caboose Board is where the rest of the letters and punctuation keys go. I call this a "board" not a "ring" because more keys can be fit onto steam's menu system by making two rows then making a ring, which provides a natural place for extensibility for additional critical keys needed only for a specific game or program that won't mess up carefully arranged rings.

Controller Face Buttons, and Left & Right Triggers.

At this point all the letters from the qwerty keyboard are mapped onto the onboard Steam Deck controls. We just need to tidy up and map a few remaining keys outside of the main 3 rows of the keyboard and make some quality of life mappings for important controls in Cataclysm DDA.

Up until this step, other than starting from the assumption that mouse control is unneeded for this mapping, I haven't made any keyboard mappings that are only memorable or salient in the context of Cataclysm DDA. Only after this point am I actually assigning keys to the facebuttons of the Steam Deck based on the specific requirements of Cataclysm DDA. Think about how much easier this makes it to create and memorize the muscle memory of mappings for the next complicated game you want to tackle creating Steam Deck bindings for, if it is a roguelike or other game/software that can be played without a mouse than at least 85% of these mappings don't need to be changed. If mouse control is needed, it is easy to imagine slotting the number ring into a toggleable alternate menu that shares the same control binding. Or the caboose.

These final mappings are intended to be intuitive to someone who has used a gamepad a lot (especially xbox controller). Escape is mapped to the menu face button, tab to the view face button, backspace maps to the x facebutton, spacebar to the b facebutton, enter to the right trigger and shift to the left trigger allowing the shift key to easily be held like it is intended to be on a qwerty keyboard.

Some final quality of life tweaks for CDDA, a single press of the y facebutton activates the / key to bring up the advanced inventory management screen (absolutely amazingly powerful utility in CDDA) and a double press of the y facebutton activates they ? key to bring up list of commands with plain english search. A single press of the a facebutton is mapped to " which brings up the movement toggle (run, walk, crouch, prone). A double press brings up the mutations menu with [ (a somewhat tenous mapping to remember I concede, this is a draft tho). For now I have the thumbstick buttons mapped to + and -.

A Final Note On Menus

It is important to adjust the in menu sensitivity especially for navigational rings like the Vim Ring, WASD Ring and Number Ring. Typically for a ring assigned to a joystick one might want to set menu button activation to continous (with these repeat turbo settings) and tweak sensitivity so it is easy to reach the menu buttons on the far edges of the menu without it being uncomfortable or resulting in accidental activations of other keys.

Sorry this post is a week late, been busy with real life stuff.

In Desktop Mode there are plenty of free and open source games available, which can be manually added to Steam Launcher.

I heard about this awhile back, but only got around to trying it now. Junk Store is a newer Decky Plugin that allows you to view and install any of your Epic games store games right from game mode. You could already install epic games through Heroic and some other tools in desktop mode, but this is one allows easier installation (in my opinion), has full controller support for the library management UI, and will install the new games so that they show up like native steam games in your library. Overall I was really impressed by how well it worked, and wanted to recommend it.

To install it, first install the plugin from the Decky store. When you open the plugin, it will show you some different screens, and you need to go to the dependency screen and install all dependencies needed (it will do this for you, you just need to click one button). After that, close and reopen the plugin and it will show you an empty library and ask you to log into Epic. Once you're logged in, that library screen should show all your Epic games, and you can select any of them to install. After the game is installed, it will show up in the "Non Steam" tab of your library.

The plugin mentions GOG support, but it's not live yet. Also the junk store has an open plugins system that will hopefully allow other game libraries to all be accessed this way as well.

Seen a few times bazzite has been mentioned, but just have seen another user say they have OpenSUSE installed.

I'm not sure what the benefits of these options are, especially non-steamOS ISOs?

Proton 9.0 is officially out of beta, and should be automatically downloaded to your deck. Includes performance improvements and fixes for a lot of games.

It especially fixes a number of older games that would crash if you had too many cpu cores.

GeForce Now is a game streaming service. It was previously possible to use it on deck, but Nvidia is making it much easier to install and get set up. They also recently improved gamepad navigation of their service.

To install, go to their install page in desktop mode and scroll down to the steam deck option. Download and run the script.

The advantage of streaming services like this is getting great performance on lower power devices, and minimal battery usage.

Top 20 games played on Steam Deck in the April 2024, sorted by playtime

#SteamDeck #linuxgaming @steamdeck

For Steam Deck OLED support they said it's ready to the point that "it should be mostly functional", however there's at least one major issue left which "has to do with audio crashing when switching to Desktop Mode" and some other issues related to HDR support.

For those who don't know, the deck has three update channels: stable, beta, and main. The main channel has been on version 3.6 while stable and beta are both on 3.5.

The main channel just recently changed to 3.7 though. This is most significant because this likely means we'll start to see 3.6 make it's way into the beta channel, and then eventually released for stable.

Some improvements likely coming in the 3.6 update are mura improvements (fixing Samsung display OLED models) and changing swap files over to ZRAM.

I was recently trying to get some of the 4 player local games I have to work remotely.. Some have native multiplayer but with limitations (castle crashers only lets two local and two remote players play) bople battle only allows one local player in remote multi player mode.

However for both the above I was able to get remote play together working which basically let me map the remote player to a controller and play the game in local mode.

This however only worked on these games, I THINK they are linux native.. Games that didn't work / provide no controller mapping for remote play together Streets of rage 4, TMNT Redders revenge did not work. These games show support for remote play together in the steam library but I suspect the limitation is on the steam deck?

Anyone else have experience with Remote Play Together on the steam deck? It is nice as the remote party doesn't need a copy of the game and as noted gets around some of the multi player limits of some games.

Any suggestions? Alternatives? Tweaks?

My game is modded to hell, I have a lot of them. Naturally, due to all the extra scripts and stuff, it played fine, but it had points where things would lag slightly. Plus, using a mod for punching, I would sometimes hit npcs so hard that their bodies would stretch, skew and deform to such extremes it would absolutely tank my fps and crash the entire deck. However, using 9.0, I've noticed the lag is gone, the game feels smoother, and the punching issue seems to have gone away, because it happened a few times on 9.0 but the game still ran fine. I will add, that before using 9.0 I verified the game files. So, my question is, is it the verification or the new proton that has possibly improved the game? I'm still learning as I go with this thing, so I'd appreciate it if you could help me expand my knowledge on Linux and the deck.

Original video: https://youtu.be/1KEtxTQUzxY

Fallout 4 just got updated with a "next-gen" update that got the game Steam Deck verified, fixed bugs, and added some new content.

However one of the ways they got the game verified was by disabling the game's launcher by default, the same launcher that is the only way to change graphical settings.

You can re-enable the launcher by changing your steam launch settings to SteamDeck=0 %command%

• Fixed an issue causing no sound output in games that open and close audio devices quickly like Super Blood Hockey
• Stability and security improvements

This combines updates .18 and .19 from the beta channel. Valve is usually more specific about what "stability and security" fixes include. Between being oddly non+specific and the fact that they pushed this update out as quickly as they did, I have a suspicion they were fixing a significant security issue. So probably best to update as soon as you're able.

The sound fix will be nice for affected games as well. I know Dishonored 2 would lose audio after the deck went to sleep, and that's fixed now. I can't confirm if it was actually this patch that fixed it though, but it's a great fix to have regardless.

Here's the official patch notes

There's a New Startup Animation on the Points Shop - Dead Island 2

Sometimes I hit an npc so hard with the gorilla arms their body deforms, and the game slows to a crawl. When this happens, I have to exit the game completely. When I get to the main menu of my deck it runs fine but putting it to sleep doesn't work, it just black screens, like its struggling to get caught up from the frame drop in the game. Any idea what's happening?