What's new in OmniControl

Updates now reach everyone, and uninstalling can no longer strand your controller

Until now only a paid account could update in place. Everyone else was sent back to the website for each new version, which meant most people were running whatever they first downloaded, through every fix since. Any signed-in account now updates itself, free or Pro. Alongside that, this release fixes three ways the uninstaller could go wrong, one of which left a controller hidden from every game with no app left to un-hide it, and stops a reinstall from being able to delete your profiles. Forty-four new game presets bring the catalog to 449.

• OmniControl updates itself for any signed-in account, free or Pro. It used to require a licence, so most people never received a fix unless they went and downloaded one.
• It keeps checking while it is open, and again when you come back to the window, instead of once at startup. An install that opened with no connection used to wait until the next restart.
• Forty-four new game presets: Overwatch 2, Halo Infinite, Warframe, Team Fortress 2, DayZ, Ready or Not, Elden Ring Nightreign, Silksong, Armored Core VI, Oblivion Remastered, Metal Gear Solid Delta, Split Fiction, Hades II, DiRT Rally 2.0, Le Mans Ultimate, SnowRunner, Ace Combat 7, skate., Tony Hawk 3 + 4, Civilization VII, Frostpunk 2, Silent Hill f and more. The catalog is now 449.

Crosshair Studio, and a controller that stops fighting you on Remote Play

A crosshair drawn at the exact centre of your screen, for the games that do not draw one well or at all. Twenty-one shapes, forty-four ready-made designs, a builder for placing several shapes yourself, your own image if you would rather, and every one of them saveable, shareable by code, and assignable to a game. It is free. Alongside it, OmniControl now recognises a PS5 Remote Play client and warns you about the thing that makes a character walk by itself: the client merges every connected controller with your keyboard, so a pad resting on the desk with a little stick drift beats you. This release also carries a set of fixes that were prepared a week ago and never published, including a recorded trigger replaying at full pull.

• Crosshair Studio, a new section in the sidebar. A crosshair at the centre of your screen, over whatever is running, in its own window that cannot take a click meant for the game.
• Twenty-one shapes and forty-four ready-made designs, each drawn by the real renderer in its own tile, so what you see in the gallery is what lands on your screen.
• Build your own out of up to eight shapes you place yourself, on a canvas whose centre is the aim point. Or import your own PNG, JPEG, WebP or GIF.

Ghost Replay, and a keyboard setup for sixty-one games in one click

Ghost Replay records everything your controller does across a whole session and plays it back into the game. It is built for long takes rather than combos: a lap, a raid pull, a full match, up to thirty minutes, started with one button on any recording in your Library. An audit run before release found three defects that together meant it had never actually worked, and all of them are fixed here. Alongside it, Remote Play presets for sixty-one games now apply onto your bindings in one click, there is a yearly plan at $59.99 beside the monthly one, creators earn 15 percent of every payment for as long as their customer keeps paying, and the devices that had quietly become impossible to delete can now be cleared from your own dashboard.

• Ghost Replay records everything your controller does across a whole session and plays it back into the game. Up to thirty minutes, against the hundred seconds the old recorder could hold.
• Start Ghost is the primary button on every recording in your Library. Pressing it puts the progress bar and the cancel hint in front of you before the pad starts moving.
• It records whatever is driving the pad, whether that is a real controller, keyboard and mouse, or a controller you have hidden under emulation. Each source is greyed out when it is not actually running.

An overlay your capture software can actually record, and packs that arrive with the author's instructions

The overlay recorded as a solid black rectangle for a lot of people, and nothing on the Overlay page could fix it: the window that draws over a game has to be transparent, and Windows composites a transparent window in a way OBS's default capture method cannot read. Capture mode is now its own separate window, opaque and in the taskbar, that every capture method records correctly. Alongside it, a game pack can now carry the author's own instructions and screenshots, written in a block editor inside the app and shown both on the pack's page here and in the app's import preview before anything is applied. This release also removes a behaviour: auto sprint no longer engages while your keyboard is driving the movement stick, because a keyboard cannot make a threshold gesture and it was holding L3 down for the whole time you were moving. Behind those sits a third pass over Drive a Controller, including an engine clock that had every timing window in the product running about 40 percent long and an aim down sights key that did nothing at all at the settings it ships with.

• Capture mode is now its own overlay window: opaque, decorated, draggable and in the taskbar. Point OBS at it with any capture method, including the default one, and it records what you see. Tick Client Area to drop the title bar.
• A game pack can carry the author's own instructions and screenshots. They show on the pack's page on this site, and in the app's import preview above the list of what the pack will change, because that is the part that tells you whether you want it.
• Write them in the app: headings, paragraphs, numbered steps, notes and up to eight images, with a live preview drawn by the same renderer an importer sees.

Theme Drops, and ninety-six moving finishes for your controller

The animated finishes for your controller go from thirty-eight to ninety-six, and thirty-two of them are not in the app's gallery: they arrive as Theme Drops, finishes that live on the website and land in your app through a link. The gallery itself gains twenty-six new animated finishes and thirty-five new plain colour themes, leads with the animated ones instead of burying them under a scroller, and gains a labelled Download beside Save current. A drop is saved into your own themes before it is applied, so it is editable, keepable and does not vanish if you stop paying, and any Pro licence takes one however you paid for it. This release also carries a fix worth knowing about: every animated theme shared as a code was coming back with the wrong three colours.

• Twenty-six new animated finishes in the Themes gallery, taking it from thirty-eight to sixty-four: Rainfall, Snowfall, Sandstorm, Shallows, Meadow Wind, Marble, Figured Wood, Brushed Steel, Nacre, Craquelure, Phoenix, St Elmo's Fire, Ion Drive, Prism Cast, Sonar Sweep, Projection, Reactor Core, Hyperdrive, Deflector, Suminagashi, Kaleidoscope, Contour, Moire, Chevron Rush, Race Livery and Impact Map.
• Thirty-five new plain colour themes, taking those from twenty-six to sixty-one and weighted toward what the set was short of, which was anything that was not dark: real hardware finishes, jewel and metal, and era pieces like Vaporwave, Blueprint, Phosphor and Newsprint.
• The gallery now leads with the animated ones. They used to sit under the static presets, below the fold of a capped scroller, which is where nobody found them. That group is now labelled Static rather than Presets.

Controller skins that actually move, and a theme that follows you around the app

Thirty-eight animated finishes for your controller - nebula clouds that drift, lava seams that breathe under a dark crust, circuit traces with light travelling down them. They are drawn on your own pad in 3D, they run in the overlay while you play, and you can change their colours and speed. Alongside that, your theme now applies everywhere OmniControl draws your device rather than only on the overlay, colours are remembered per controller instead of being shared across all of them, and the keyboard can be themed for the first time. Plus a fix for the emulated stick stuttering during a steady turn, and a profile switch that was only applying half of a profile.

• Thirty-eight animated controller skins under Themes: Galaxy, Inferno, Kintsugi, Oil Slick, Cipher, Event Horizon, Liquid Chrome, Neon Grid and more. Each one is a moving finish rather than a colour, drawn on your own controller model.
• Every skin exposes its own controls - speed, colours, strength and pattern scale - and only the ones that effect actually uses. A few respond to what you are doing: Thermal runs hot where you are gripping and pressing.
• Your theme now applies everywhere the app draws your device, including the Dashboard and the keyboard overlay, not just inside the overlay.

A guided introduction, and a camera that stops turning on its own

There is now a proper introduction to what OmniControl actually does between your controller and your game, built on the 3D controller and reachable forever from the sidebar. It exists because the same three questions come up constantly, and none of them are really questions about a setting. Alongside it, a fix for the emulated stick drifting by itself while playing with keyboard and mouse, and a fix for updates that could lose profile changes you made in the minute before updating.

• Get Started: a guided tour that uses your own controller in 3D to explain how OmniControl sits between your device and your game, why a game can end up seeing two controllers at once, and how to play with keyboard and mouse. It stays in the sidebar afterwards so you can re-read any single topic.
• The pages that most often confuse people now link straight to the part of the tour that explains them, so the answer arrives when you hit the problem rather than on your first day.
• Play Mode can be opened and closed with a hotkey, so you no longer have to alt-tab out of a match to reach it.

Bring your DS4Windows profiles, and six new overlay themes

Switching from DS4Windows? Point OmniControl at your profile and it brings over what maps cleanly, then tells you plainly what still needs setting up - you are never handed a profile that quietly behaves differently from the one you tuned. There are six new overlay themes. And a handful of fixes for things that were quietly wrong: a mapping pack that looked like it did nothing for Pro users, and game automation that could be left running after a game closed.

• Import from DS4Windows: pick your profile, see exactly what carries over and what still needs manual setup, then import it as a new profile. The honest report is the point - your output controller, stick and trigger tuning, and button remaps come across, and anything that cannot be translated faithfully is named rather than silently dropped.
• Six new overlay themes: Aurora, Abyss, Toxic, Royal, Rose Gold and Sunset, twenty-six in all, several of them showing off stick and trigger reactions the older themes never used.

Less to wade through, and five things that were quietly broken

A pass over every screen to cut what nobody used. Whole rows of controls that duplicated each other, restated a choice you had already made, or configured something that does nothing until output is running - gone, so the settings that matter are not buried under the ones that do not. Then five defects a real user actually hits: a favourite star that could only ever be switched off, a page that told everyone no controller was connected, a search that led to a blank rectangle with no way back, two identical buttons a hand's width apart, and a switch that disappeared the moment you flipped it.

• A simplification pass across all seventeen screens: controls that duplicated one another, repeated a choice already made, or did nothing until output was running have been removed.
• The settings that change what your controller does are no longer buried under ones that do not.
• Nothing you had configured changes - this is about what is shown, not what is stored.

Controllers we have never seen, and a server blip that stopped being fatal

A controller with no built-in support now works on its own, by reading the description every controller already publishes about itself. There is a setup flow that asks you to press each button, and a panel that finally answers why a plugged-in controller is not showing up. Also two fixes that had no workaround: one bad response from our server used to disarm every install in the world instantly, and there was no control anywhere that could stop a macro already running.

• Controllers without built-in support are now read automatically, from the controller's own description of itself.
• A setup flow that asks you to press each button in turn, including back buttons, and skips anything your pad does not have.
• Choose which layout an unrecognised controller is shown as, remembered per controller and per connection.

The macro that nothing could stop, and a Hold that never held

A macro could keep running after you deleted it, and turning emulation off did not help. Hold mode was a toggle wearing the wrong name, and the setting meant to cut a run short on release could not do anything at all. Plus a pull threshold for the analog triggers, and three changes that make a recoil pattern feel like a hand instead of a script.

• Hold mode now runs while you hold the button, and stops when you let go.
• Choose whether letting go cuts the run off instantly or finishes the pass.
• Set how far L2 or R2 must be pulled before a macro fires.

The touchpad click that arrived as a different button

Mapping a button to the DualShock 4 touchpad sent the wrong button entirely, and choosing DualShock 4 while output was stopped never took effect at all. Plus hotkeys now accept any key and your mouse side buttons, macros take typed stick and trigger values, and a save file that will not load is kept instead of overwritten.

• Hotkeys accept any key on the keyboard, plus the side buttons on your mouse.
• Type exact stick coordinates and trigger pulls into a macro instead of recording them.
• A Back buttons check that tells you what your controller's paddles actually send.

Why macros never fired on an Xbox controller

One wrong number was behind macros not firing, the hide check giving the wrong answer, and the Player 1 panel reporting the opposite of reality. Plus you can now type an exact value into any slider, pause macros from a hotkey, and select several at once.

• Type an exact value into any slider instead of dragging for it.
• Pause or resume a macro, or all of them, from a global hotkey.
• Select several macros at once to enable, disable or delete them together.

The Steam Controller, and hiding no longer breaks Xbox pads

Full support for Valve's Steam Controller, our twelfth controller. Plus the fix for hiding leaving an Xbox controller unusable until you unplugged it, which is very likely the reason hiding worked for other people and not for you.

• New: full support for Valve's Steam Controller, including both trackpads and all four grip buttons.
• Rear and grip buttons can now be bound from the controller itself, instead of only from the list view.
• Buttons that cannot drive an emulated pad now say so, instead of quietly dropping what you picked.

Applying a pack no longer switches Drive off

Most packs quietly turned Drive a Controller off when applied, while the page still showed it as on. If Drive stopped working for you after applying a pack, this was why. Plus four macro fixes and touchpad output on the DualShock 4.

• Record a macro from inside your game with a global hotkey, instead of tabbing out to start and stop.
• A macro that moves a stick no longer takes the stick away from you, so a recoil pull works while you keep aiming.
• New: stop a macro the moment you release its trigger, instead of playing it to the end.

A better first hide

After hiding your controller, the page asked you to connect a controller. Yours was already connected, and hidden, which is exactly what you had just asked for.

Xbox controllers can be hidden

Hiding your controller from games now works for Xbox and SCUF controllers, not just PlayStation ones. If a game kept reading your real controller instead of OmniControl, this is the fix.

• Xbox and SCUF controllers can now be hidden from games. Confirmed working on real Xbox hardware.
• Drive a Controller now tells you when it is receiving nothing, instead of looking like it works.

Overlay Studio, and a lot more packs

Design your on-screen overlay by clicking the part you want to paint, share a theme with a code, and fire a macro from two buttons held together. Plus 110 new game packs, including keyboard-to-controller presets for 73 games.

• Overlay Studio: click a part of the controller and paint it, with 20 presets and share codes that work offline.
• A macro can now be triggered by a button combination, like L1 and R1 held together.
• The Wii Remote shake can be put on a button instead of flicking the controller.

Native Input Mute fixes

A muted movement key could stay stuck down, which pinned the virtual stick to one side and stopped it responding. Fixed, along with three smaller faults in the same subsystem.

• A muted key whose release was missed no longer stays stuck down, so strafing with muted WASD responds properly again.
• The mouse is only routed through OmniControl when you have actually selected a mouse input to mute.
• Muting the keyboard can no longer be delayed by mouse movement.

Native Input Mute

Stop chosen keys and mouse inputs doing their normal job in Windows while OmniControl keeps using them, so an input driving your virtual controller no longer also types or clicks. Free on both tiers, with every way out built in.

• Native Input Mute: pick keys, mouse buttons, the wheel or pointer movement and stop them performing their normal Windows actions.
• Muted inputs still reach OmniControl, so a key driving your virtual stick no longer also types into whatever is behind the game.
• Global by design: no game detection, no per-game setup, no lists. One hotkey turns it on and off from anywhere.

A rebuilt dashboard and tabbed settings

The dashboard was redesigned around what you do next, Settings moved into tabs, and Emulation and Keyboard & Mouse now state plainly what Pro unlocks while leaving setup open to everyone.

• Rebuilt dashboard: your active profile, setup progress and quick actions in one place.
• Settings is now tabbed, and links from elsewhere in the app open the exact tab you need.
• Emulation and Keyboard & Mouse show what Pro unlocks up front, and both can still be set up in full on the free tier.

Timing-free turn calibration and a calmer Keyboard & Mouse page

The turn-rate wizard is gone. Line up a landmark, turn one full circle, tap F8. The overlay now mirrors the keyboard-and-mouse pad for Xbox, and the Keyboard & Mouse page was rebuilt around an in-app guide.

• Turn-match calibration replaces the old spin-and-tap wizard - no stopwatch, just line up a landmark and turn one full circle.
• F8 starts and stops the measurement from any window.
• Keyboard & Mouse is selectable as an emulation input.

Keyboard & Mouse: play controller-only games with mouse and keyboard

The flagship feature. Drive a virtual pad from your keyboard and mouse on games that only accept a controller, with a turn calibration that makes the mouse feel like a mouse instead of a stick.

• Keyboard & Mouse input: WASD to the left stick, mouse to aim, every key mappable to a button, trigger, or macro.
• A turn calibration that locks your in-game turn rate so aim tracks the mouse instead of drifting.
• Play Mode for switching cleanly between configuring a mapping and playing with it live.

Seven emulation outputs, a rebuilt macro recorder, and a wave of UI work

Every emulation backend is now real - two virtual pads, keyboard, keyboard and mouse, and three Dolphin targets - alongside a macro recorder that captures sticks, triggers, and mouse, and a broad interface pass.

• All seven emulation outputs are live: virtual Xbox 360 and DualShock 4, keyboard, keyboard + mouse, and three Dolphin targets.
• The macro recorder now captures sticks, triggers, and mouse movement with per-tick timing, and turns emulation on automatically for playback.
• A Controllers status hub, stick-curve presets, and a live trigger histogram.