this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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Steam Deck

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Hey everyone,

I took the gamble on Starfield on the Deck and am honestly having a good time. The Bethesda jankiness is bringing me back to playing Oblivion. I have never used a controller with back pedals and really want to dive in. I went through the controller settings but couldn't find a way to pass through the back pedals to be assignable buttons.

What I would like to do is be able to toggle the in-game flashlight or pulling up the map. I can do the binding in game, but I just cannot figure out how to pass through the buttons to the game itself.

Would this be something the Deck would be capable of doing, and would anyone have some recommendations on good ways to use the extra rear buttons inside controller oriented games?

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[–] Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are you trying to configure the back buttons in steam input, or in the game's controller settings? I'd definitely recommend setting them up in steam input if the latter.

You could set the back buttons to work as keyboard keys that trigger flashlight/etc when using a keyboard and mouse. This is assuming there isn't a controller button for it already.

[–] LordXenu@artemis.camp 1 points 1 year ago

Tried both. Configuring in-game, the game had zero clue the buttons seemed to exist. Which makes since it’s an emulated gamepad.

I did try assigning via the controller settings key inputs I could then bind but using any non controller type input would flip the game into thinking it was mouse + keyboard. I’ve ran into this behavior a few times on the deck when adjusting the volume so this may end up being something that gets smoothed out. The game isn’t technically released yet so I don’t expect everything to be 100% smooth out of the gate.

[–] dummbaum@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

If I remember right, there is a toggle to use the back buttons, and then you can set them. Not with my deck so not sure exactly where in the controller settings it is

[–] Panron@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The flashlight is already bound to LB; holding it for a second vs tapping one of the back buttons doesn't really seem like a worthwhile use to, same for the map (which can be opened directly by long pressing "start"; or "select" if you haven't reversed their mapping in Steam input to get the correct button prompts).

Honestly, I've yet to find a good use for the back buttons in Starfield; I'm considering mapping one of them to F5 for quick save, but that's generally just a double tap of start and one tap of A, so it's not inconvenient enough for me to have gone with the button mapping.

[–] LordXenu@artemis.camp 1 points 1 year ago

I agree that it’s not the most worthwhile use of the buttons and you are right about using the triggers. For now I’ve just mapped the back buttons to mirror the shoulder buttons and it’s working well. I also agree that all of the shortcuts I asked about are already present with long presses, I just am not a fan overall of buttons having more than one action associated just in general not even specifically about video gaming input.

To me it’s one of those things where if I was playing the game on my desktop I would bind small things like that to macro keys just for convenience.

I’ll be honest I didn’t even notice the prompts for start/select were backwards. Today I learned LOL