Community Spotlight: Steam Control 360

In March 2011, Valve introduced a lot easier method to bring Steam to people's living rooms. In order to contact PCs linked with televisions, Valve announced "big-picture mode." Rrt had been supposed to offer full controller support that will allow gamers to navigate their Steam library in the comfort of these couch. Sadly, the feature remains in limbo without any timetable for the arrival.

One Shacker that had been awaiting big-picture mode was Brian "electroly" Luft. Luft has utilized controllers in reference to his PC for quite a while, starting with Sony's PSX and PS2 controllers before being sold to the Wii Controllers. For couch players like Luft, the only way to remotely launch Steam titles without walking onto their PC would have been to use wireless peripherals. Along with feeling being a clunky solution, Luft described the discomfort and silliness of using a mouse atop a couch. Big-picture mode would address these concerns, and that's why Valve's continuing silence around the feature has proven disappointing.

That's why Luft has had matters into their own hands. Although many loose time waiting for Valve's official "real picture" solution, they have constructed a stopgap solution from the beginning, dubbing it "Steam Control 360."

Coded in the C programing language, Steam Control 360 monitors the Wii Accessories using Microsoft's XInput library and draws the launcher interface using titles and logo graphics from Steam.

It proved to be an easy process for Luft. "Much like developing any piece of software that's dominated by the consumer interface without much complexity underneath," shortly fater he began, "it's largely dependent on just grinding throughout the implementation of each one part of anyone experience, referencing the developer documentation as required. I've written many Windows applications before, which means this part was largely old hat. With all the Xbox 360 console controller was new for me personally, however the XInput library turned out to be delightfully simple to use. Major kudos to Microsoft making it easy for developers make use of their controller. I see now why many games offer the video game accessories exclusively, rather than supporting any gamepad through the clunkier DirectInput library."

The overall simple writing the application's code made Luft wonder why similar launchers don't exist. However, there was clearly a number of bumps from the road. Luft noted that this most challenging part of creating Steam Control 360 was finding out learn to get the list of Steam games installed on a user's computer. Despite Steam shipping with several libraries that exposed numerous programming interfaces, Luft had trouble keeping them to be effective. After wracking his brain for several nights, he eventually found an answer.

"Ultimately I concluded on while using the Steam Community website, which conveniently lists all of the Steam games owned by each user," Luft said. "The unfortunate side effect in this approach is the fact that non-Steam games usually are not listed and that i just have entry to the small logo graphics that show on Steam community profiles, rather than the giant logos the truth is in Steam's grid view. In addition, the Steam Community website lists every game a user has ever purchased, besides the games which have been installed. For obvious reasons, the launcher only shows games which were installed locally. Determining whether the game is installed seriously isn't nearly as straightforward as you would think. I suspect that all of those issues would vanish if I had direct access towards the Steam programming interfaces, and it's clear that the official big-picture mode could execute a superior job."

Even with these technical setbacks, Steam Control 360 has proved to be a fine stopgap solution. After releasing the appliance and accompanying tutorial, Luft received feedback from the amount of users on approaches to improve it. "I absolutely agree with lots of the suggestions I've received," he said. "For instance, it would be nice when it caused games that use their own intermediate launchers, like Ubisoft games and MMOs. Currently, Steam Control 360 provides where the launcher, but then you're here we are at arising and walking over to your computer to click Have fun with the mouse."