Besides being a mouse, you can map it to a virtual menu with as many shortcuts as you want, the shortcuts being key presses/combos, allowing you to bind way more things than would otherwise fit on a controller. You can also set up mouse regions so that the trackpad only maps to a part of the screen and will instantly jump there, like for moving around an inventory window or minimap.
For games without controller support or where KB+M has an advantage, the trackpads are a game changer. Imagine a hotbar like in Minecraft or Terraria, but instead of having to go left or right one at a time with your bumpers, you could spawn a radial menu with the touchpad and instantly flick to "8" or "5" or "1" to select those slots.
If you want to utilize all features of an 8BitDo controller at once, you also need Steam. XInput mode means no gyro, no back buttons bindable in software, Switch mode gives you gyro but makes your triggers digital, and you still can't bind the back buttons in software. You're limited to duplicating an existing input via the 8BitDo app and binding it globally at the firmware level. If you use the 8BitDo Pro 2 with Steam in DInput mode, you get analog triggers, gyro, and the back buttons are bindable in software per-game. This was not the case on release, 8BitDo and Valve worked together and gave this improved support via an update.
The software around controllers is universally bad, and Valve is the first to really try to fix it. We need a successor to XInput that is less limited.
It's been driving me crazy seeing all the hate Valve is getting over compatibility concerns when Valve is the only one making controller support on Windows outside of an Xbox controller work. For years I just assumed I couldn't use many of my controllers on Windows, until Steam added the ability to act as the in between and properly handle it. Microsoft has no interest in making anything other than their Xbox controllers work, and everyone suggesting some sort of "I can just buy X as an alternative" has some major caveat that gets conveniently ignored.
I also got one and didn't think scalpers were the problem at the time. I have since seen eBay listings of people trying to sell the controllers (that they don't even have yet) for 3x the price, though, so they maybe did play a role. There was a limit of 2 controllers per Steam account and they sold out within 30 minutes, so not sure if bots were used or what. There wasn't a lot of time to mess around. I've seen a lot of people who wanted one couldn't get one. Personally I added it to my cart about 2 minutes before the official start time and then it took 12 minutes or so of retrying to actually check out.
I added it to my cart 2 minutes before and spent 3 hours trying before realizing that just because it's in your cart doesn't mean it exists since it was actually out of stock.
I used to in the mid 2000s but they kinda lost their magic for me at some point. They briefly regained the magic when I realized I could encode arbitrary text and make my own, but then I had so much trouble scanning the giant QR code I made (from printer paper) that the magic was gone again.
I agree that accidental mouse actions in a TTY are horrible, but generally speaking if you hold shift when clicking and dragging, it will work at the terminal emulater layer instead of sending the clicks to the program in the terminal. I have been shift-clicking like this for years. More because I'm generally in tmux than anything else. If I click and drag without shift I think tmux intercepts it usually.
I thought this was going to be about the widespread issue of free software projects trying to make you use Discord to discuss or report things. There was a week or two where I saw people expressing interest in moving to other things, but that already seems to have died down. I assume they all gave up and went back to Discord after all.
Every open source project I look at right now uses Discord, to my chagrin. Discord isn't totally awful, but it's ephemeral and requires a huge bloated web app.
Doubly frustrating is that I can't even use Discord if I wanted to. Every time I try to make an account, it gets banned or phone-walled almost immediately afterwards. This has been a known problem with them for years with many people, and even if you try to appeal your ban, you just get "our automated system is working properly, goodbye."
Are there any good illustrations showing how much bigger their eyes were compared to modern humans? Is it really significant? I'm having trouble finding anything that makes it clear.
This is about how I feel when people discuss "owning" games, and GOG vs Steam. It's just data, you can make a backup or get someone else's, bypass DRM if needed, and you don't own the copyright either way. Interestingly, though, when you apply it to books here, I feel shocked and even a little resistant to the idea. Mostly because of the physical object you say to put aside, though. Similarly to games, it would feel weird to say I owned an epub or pdf I downloaded. I'd probably say I "have" it, or "read it" or am "storing" it on x or y device.
For games without controller support or where KB+M has an advantage, the trackpads are a game changer. Imagine a hotbar like in Minecraft or Terraria, but instead of having to go left or right one at a time with your bumpers, you could spawn a radial menu with the touchpad and instantly flick to "8" or "5" or "1" to select those slots.
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