Does anyone know if the touchpads of the SD (OLED if it matters) have proper multi-touch? As in, you can map two buttons there and both can be pressed completely independently (i.e. hold one while tapping the other)?
It’s niche but I lay my Deck down on my lap and drum on the pads with 2 fingers per pad to play a Rhythm game and haven’t found the right settings yet. I’ve found so far that with Steam Input configs, the only way to somewhat get two button presses at once is with the 8 way overlap, but I’m pretty sure that even then, it only interpolates the two touches and sends the input of wherever the interpolated input ends up. So if it happens to land in the overlap area, you get two different button presses as expected, but if you’re off by a little, you get two presses of the same button instead. This also means that if you make the overlap area too large, it’s also too easy to tap on that with one finger and unintentionally fat-finger.

So I wanted to know if I’m missing the correct settings in Steam Input? Or is there some plugin for this? Or does the hardware not support multi-touch at all and I’m out of luck?

  • DeconceptualistEnglish
    8·
    5 months ago

    Chronos’ guide is the most comprehensive one I know but I don’t see anything there about trackpad multi-touch. My impression is that they’re really designed for one thumb each while you hold the Deck. (Side note, the trackpads do accept a surprisingly deep range of pressure input).

    How about using the touchscreen? Many sources claim it accepts 10-finger input. Of course the game itself would probably have to support that (common on mobile but rare on PC). Or maybe there’s a plugin somewhere to map specific screen region touches to other input buttons and such.

      • DeconceptualistEnglish
        2·
        5 months ago

        One other longshot: You didn’t say what game but if it’s a smaller / indie title you could try reaching out to the devs and saying “Hey you know this would be a ton of fun on a tablet or PC touchscreen”. You never know, maybe they didn’t considere that, but they might agree that it’s a great idea and add it officially.