I’ve been playing Tower Unite with the Steam Controller since the game first hit early access. I used Steam to map the left stick to the Steam Controller’s stick, and the mouse to the right touchpad and gyro. This way, I could have all of the benefits of a controller, with most of the precision of a mouse, and I can combine it with custom on-screen touch menus for the many keyboard bindings that won’t fit on a controller’s limited number of buttons. I’m aware that supporting a niche, out-of-production controller probably isn’t a high priority for you guys, but it’s also possible to have similar setups through Steam with other input methods, like the Steam Deck, and PlayStation and Nintendo controllers (Xbox is still stuck in 2001 ;;).
Before the controller support update, Tower Unite accepted mouse and controller inputs simultaneously, allowing configurations like this to be possible. These kinds of updates should be great for users of controllers with gyro aiming because it means that, once controller support spans the entire game, there’ll no longer be any need to map keyboard keys to controller inputs, or to manually switch to different sets of bindings for TU’s radically different game modes. Unfortunately, TU now also automatically switches between different input modes - one for KB+M and one for controllers - whenever the game detects any kind of input from the opposite mode. Some games just change button glyphs automatically when switching inputs while others cause major UI changes, or cause the controls themselves to be wholly enabled and disabled for each input type. TU, depending on the game mode, does all three. Binding mouse movement to touchpad and/or gyro controls is now incompatible with analog stick movement, as well as the other controller related benefits of the update.
There are multiple ways this issue could be addressed. Despite my wall of text (sorry), some of these solutions are quite simple. Just one solution would be enough, but multiple could co-exist.
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Only switch from controller mode to KB+M mode when a keyboard key or mouse button are pressed, not when the mouse moves.
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Add a setting to force the game into controller mode at all times while still accepting mouse (or KB+M) inputs.
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Add full support for the Steam Input API.
With 1 and 2, the controller’s gyro could send mouse inputs to the game via Steam or other remapping software, but the convenience and simplicity of auto-switching would still mostly be present.
3 is an option that I’ve seen people ask about in one form or another multiple times already, and would have a number of additional benefits. In-game glyphs could automatically change to match different controllers and bindings, the game could automatically switch between different “sets” of bindings depending on the game mode (more useful in TU than most games), and Steam bindings could be based on actions (shoot on RT) instead of inputs (left click on RT). This is in addition to the controller features in Steam that already work with TU, like touch menus, uploading custom bindings to Steam for other players to download and try, and too many tweakable settings to mention. Steam Input support could also be a way of adding custom controller bindings to the game at all, but I couldn’t tell you if it would be easier to implement than an in-game solution. The downsides to Steam Input are a tiny amount of extra input lag for non-Valve controllers, and Steam Big Picture Mode being buggy and laggy sometimes. Steam Input can always be disabled in favour of a game’s native controller support via an in-game setting or Steam’s own settings.
Anyway, that’s all I have to say about that. I know that parts of this are niche enough that you guys might not want to spend too much time on them, but even a simple solution like the first two would go a long way for us gyro enthusiasts without undoing the other great work you’ve done on the update, so I hope you’ll consider it.
If anyone reading this wants to learn more about Gyro aiming, the Steam Controller, and Steam Input, I’ve made a YouTube playlist of Nerrel’s excellent videos on those topics.
Sorry again for the wall of text, lol.