this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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Steam Deck
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I didn’t think I would use the trackpads much, but now that I have them, I can’t move to a handheld that doesn’t have them. They are just too convenient.
Mainly I use them for more keybindings but they are essential for that.
It's so cool to play the old X-Wing and TIE Fighter games and be able to control them with some custom HUDs.
The cyberpunk thing is, if we were actually fighting in a resistance and you needed to practice flying TIE Fighters to know how to steal one or fight against them, you would probably be playing an emulator of an outdated but still very good empire TIE fighter simulator on a third party device :)
Rebel af
Its much more real than you think.
... What do you think an FPV aerial drone control set up looks like?
...
Apparently, the way they're doing it now is that many of the drones just have an unwinding spool of fiber optic cabling, instead of being wireless...
Because you can't jam that, can't hijack it.
So... kinda like a TOW missile.
Also... thats why it was called Operation Spider's Web.
Gossamer strands, mile and miles long.
Yeah the strategic goal of the operation better be to create a realtime DAS acoustic/seismic sensor network and that data better be given to geologists after the fact because otherwise that is a massive waste.
I'm sorry, I don't follow... what?
I am talking about the mass FPV drone attacks Ukraine just did inside Russia, by rigging up a bunch of semi-trucks as essentially road borne aircraft carriers.
DAS
https://blogs.egu.eu/divisions/sm/2023/12/02/what-is-das/
The Ukranian battlefield is a massive high resolution DAS survey waiting? to happen, the drones laying down the fiber optic cable in my opinion are the nice "two birds with one stone" benefit.
Those fields crisscrossed with fiber optic cables, well they are from a signal analysis standpoint a spiders web in that any disturbance in the microtremor wavefield is highly resolvable in terms of location and nature. Footsteps, a drone clandestinely dropping an an antitank mine, large weapon fire etc...
If you could access fiber optic cables in the vicinity of an artillery target you could determine fairly easily where exactly it fell algorithmically to a high degree of confidence. Fiber optic cables laid down for unrelated infrastructure purposes even.
I am sure I am not the first idiot to realize this shrugs the idea aggressively jumps out at you if you understand the science.
This is ambient seismology not necessarily active though a howitizer would make a mighty fine source impulse.
Damn.
I'd never heard of any of that.
Thanks for letting me know!
Conversely I bought a Steam Deck specifically because of the trackpads but I find I only ever use them on the rare occasion that I need to go to desktop mode. I love my Deck but I've discovered that could easily live without the trackpads if they weren't there.
I can't and won't play any first person perspective game with a regular controller. Track pad + gyro is so much fun! It love to at least see capacitive touch sticks + gyro adopted by other manufacturers.
I tried so hard to make that combo work for me, but ended up back with the sticks. Maybe I need to try something other than Half-Life 2.
I end up using the stick for movement, the pad for aiming.
And, due to a hand/wrist injury... switched the aiming to the left pad, and movement to the right stick, and then the right trigger is still fire, and the right track pad is a 4 way gated set of 'buttons'.
In desktop, ive got the left pad moving the mouse, up click on the right pad is left click, down click on the right pad is right click... and then any kind of click on the left pad is screen zoom.
Yep, its weird, but I love it lol.
The only thing they could improve, at this point, imo... is a way to adjust the left right up down sizes of the zones for the edge scrolling to work on a pad.
It works perfectly when you point your finger at it at a perpendicular angle, but with a thumb, the surface area of the thumb makes contact over a different shape, so thats why theres so many reports of edge scrolling 'not working' for people with certain sized/shaped thumbs and grips.
Can't look back since I got my first Steam Controller. Once you get used to them trackpads are way more comfortable (and durable) than joysticks. I'd be happy with a controller with no joysticks too. Much easier to throw in a bag and take for a trip.