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.
Highlights
- 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.
Fixes
- Hiding your controller could leave an Xbox pad unusable until you unplugged it and plugged it back in.
- Themes painted over printed logos and lettering, so the Steam logo and the A/B/X/Y letters disappeared.
- The Xbox guide logo took on theme colours instead of staying lit white.
- A gap showed under the thumbsticks on the Xbox model.
The Steam Controller
Valve's Steam Controller is now fully supported, and it is our twelfth controller.
Everything is there: both trackpads, both sticks, the four grip buttons on the back, the Steam and Quick Access buttons, and the status light. It works everywhere the other pads do, so you can remap it, build macros on it, design it in Overlay Studio and put it on stream.
It also gets its own button names, because the Steam Controller borrows from both houses and matches neither. The face buttons are A, B, X and Y like an Xbox pad, but the shoulders and stick clicks are L1, R1, L2, R2, L3 and R3 like a PlayStation one. Calling those LB and RT would have been wrong on the shell you are holding, so the app now says what your controller says.
Hiding no longer leaves an Xbox controller stuck
If you turned on Hide my controller with an Xbox pad, your controller disappeared from Windows and did not come back when you turned hiding off again. Only unplugging it and plugging it back in returned it.
That is fixed, and it is worth saying plainly what it was, because it explains a lot of confusing reports. Hiding was doing one extra step that a modern Xbox controller does not survive: it asked Windows to restart the device. Windows reported success, and the controller was left in a state nothing could recover from except physically reconnecting it. The step turned out to be unnecessary as well as harmful, so it is simply gone. Hiding takes effect immediately without it, and turning hiding off gives your controller straight back.
PlayStation controllers were never affected, which is why this could look like it worked perfectly for one person and not at all for another.
Note
On an Xbox pad, Windows decides player numbers when a controller connects and never changes them afterwards, so your controller keeps Player 1 and OmniControl arrives as Player 2. Most games only read the first controller. The Game connection card has a "Make OmniControl Player 1" step that sorts it, and it now tells you what it needs from you.
Rear and grip buttons
Rear buttons are bindable from the controller itself now. The Steam Controller's L4, R4, L5 and R5 and the Razer Raiju's M3 to M6 were previously reachable only from the list view, because the diagram cannot draw a leader line to a button on the far side of the pad. They now sit under the model, and hovering one turns the controller round so you can see what you are binding.
Two related annoyances went with it. A button that cannot drive an emulated controller now says so, rather than letting you pick an output and quietly dropping it the next time the page loaded. And clicking a rear button on the Dashboard's controller opens it in the remapper properly, instead of arriving there with nothing selected.
Themes stop painting over logos
Applying a theme used to paint over printed detail. On the Steam Controller that meant the Steam logo vanished and the button became a plain circle, and the A, B, X and Y letters went with it.
Printed symbols are now left alone by a repaint and only tinted, so they stay readable whatever colour you choose.
The Xbox controller is a special case: its guide logo stays lit white on every theme, the way a real Xbox pad looks. The Elite is the exception to the exception, because its logo behaves like a light, so it now follows whatever colour you set in Lightbar Studio.
Smaller things
The Emulation page leads with Game connection now. That is the step that decides whether a game reads OmniControl at all, so it belongs above a summary of what the output can do once it does.
The emulator integration section only appears when something can actually use it, rather than taking up space on every setup.
And the gap that showed under the thumbsticks on the Xbox model is covered.