Valve announced their controller today. We've covered what we thought the controller would be in a previous post, but we'll just sum it up in one whole post with some more in-depth guessing.
The Controller
Hardware
Here's the hardware Valve officially announced:
- Wireless
- Dual high-resolution clickable circle trackpads
- Approaches the accuracy of a desktop mouse
- New generation of super-precise haptic feedback employing dual linear resonant actuators
- High-resolution clickable touchscreen
- 16 buttons
They haven't really gone into specifics (yet) but hopefully they'll expand on this soon as they promise to "switch gears" now, starting next week with detailed specifications of their prototype Steambox.
ARM based
In a previous post we posted some USB device IDs datamined from one of the packages (direct link) in the hometest repository.
The file we got them from is named 99-steam-controller-perms.rules so that leaves little to the imagination.
#USB devices
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="c251", ATTRS{idProduct}=="2202", MODE="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="28de", ATTRS{idProduct}=="2202", MODE="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="28de", ATTRS{idProduct}=="1101", MODE="0666"
Vendor ID c251 belongs to Keil a website ran by ARM (the company) providing tools for ARM (the architecture) development.
It's likely that the top device is a debug device from Keil that Valve uses to develop the controller.
The other two below have vendor ID 28de which is unknown in all vendor databases at the moment, and likely belongs to Valve. Regarding Valve's device ID's, I think ID 2202 is the controller with touchpad and wireless magic and ID 1101 is the controller that will be used during beta with a USB cable and no touchscreen.
At the moment, sharing of bindings is not enabled in Steam beta builds, but strings are already present. From those, we know that you can upload controller configurations for each game/controller combo. You'll be able to add a configuration for the controller you use to a game via the Steam workshop. and people can vote/favorite/use them like any other workshop item.
The Planet
As for what's up with the planet?
Valve employee and Big Picture/SteamOS/Steambox guru Greg Coomer made it painfully clear to us that there was nothing hiding inside the planet.
@SteamDB it's just you. srsly.
— Greg Coomer (@gregcoomer) September 27, 2013
Naturally we wanted to see for ourselves. What if the highly anticipated sequel to Euro Truck Simulator 2 was in there?
Turns out there was something inside after all, albeit not extremely shocking. It's just the Steam logo.
The logo hasn't been fully revealed yet, and I don't think it ever really will (unless there's a surprise announcement).