There are lots of features we're excited about when it comes to Steam Controller, and Grip Sense is one of them.

Grip Sense is what we're calling the two capacitive touch sensors inside the handles of Steam Controller. They sense when your fingers are touching the locations highlighted in the image below. 

Because it's, like, cool! Actually, our driving motivation in building these was to provide another way to activate/deactivate Gyro quickly when you've moved it past your comfortable zone and need to recenter it (called "ratcheting").

It's similar to when you're using your mouse and reach the end of your mousepad: you naturally pick it up and put it back down in the middle. With ratcheting, when you get to the "edge" of your comfortable zone while using Gyro, you can lift your fingers up off the back of the controller, recenter the controller, and then put your fingers back on the controller.

The threshold for activation is adjustable. You can make it so a very slight lift of the fingers will deactivate gyro; or you can make it so you almost need take your whole hand off the controller (like in the animation above). We outline more on how to do that later in this article.

While the original intent was for ratcheting (and it does work for that!) we have found a few other cool use cases, like using it to bring up a weapon wheel, map, or menu. You can lift your fingers off the controller, the weapon wheel will pop up, then you can make your selection and put your fingers back to lock it in. We'll show you how to do that too. 

Navigate to the layout editor for a game in the Steam App or in Big Picture Mode (we outline this in our blog post on the Steam Input Configurator). Once there, ensure Gyro is set to "Gyro to Mouse", then click on the Gyro Behavior settings gear

Once in here, you will see the Gyro to Mouse settings. The first option is "Choose Gyro Button(s)". It will default to right trackpad touch and right thumbstick touch. Click in the box to the right to access the button selector menu:

This window will show all options for activating Gyro. If you are unsure what an icon means, you can hover over it and a text description will appear on top. The Grip Sense sensors are the two circled in the image below. When a button is selected, it will turn blue. To deselect, click on the button again; it will turn gray.  

Once the button is selected, it will work to disable/enable gyro in game. In this example, when you lift your right fingers off of the controller, gyro will be disabled. When your fingers are on the controller, gyro will be enabled. 

Multiple activation buttons

If there are multiple buttons selected (see example below where both grip sensors were picked), an option will appear to let you choose whether Any or All buttons are required to Enable, Suppress or Toggle the gyro. By default, it will choose Any. For grip sense, "Any" means you need to extend the fingers on both hands to disable gyro. "All" would mean you only need to extend the fingers on one hand. 

In order to use Grip Sense like you would a "press and hold" button to bring up things like weapon wheels, menus, maps, etc, you need to access it a little bit differently.

Within the game of your choice, navigate to the Layout Editor (read more in our "How to make the most of the Steam Input Configurator" blog post). Once inside the layout editor, in the Buttons section, navigate down to the grip buttons.

Pick whichever one you want to use and assign it to the button that opens up menu, weapon wheel, etc. 

Here's the tricky part: Grip Sense looks like a pressed button when your fingers are touching the grip, and we want the opposite. We want it to look like a pressed button when your fingers lift off of the grip. To do that, click on the gear icon next to the button; click on settings; then towards the bottom of the settings screen you will see an "Invert Input" toggle. Turn that on (blue).

Now, whenever the grip is released, it will activate as a button press and hold until the grip is touched again!

Everybody's hands and preferences are different, so we provided a way to adjust the Grip Sense sensitivity. If you want to change the sensitivity, you can do so by navigating to Calibration and Advanced settings for the controller. 

From the Steam App

From the menu in the top left, click Steam > Settings > Controller > Click "details" for the controller you want to modify > Scroll down until you see "Calibration & Advanced Settings" and click on "Open" > Navigate down to "Grip Sensors" where you will see the sensor adjustment interface. 

From Big Picture Mode

Hit Steam to open the Steam menu > Settings > Controller > Click "details" for the controller you want to modify > Scroll down until you see "Calibration & Advanced Settings" and click on "Open" > Navigate down to "Grip Sensors" where you will see the sensor adjustment interface. 

Adjusting the sensitivity

On the Grip Sensor Calibration page, you will see two sliders:

1. Grip Sensor Range - The further the slider is to the left, the closer your fingers need to be to the controller grips for them to be sensed. If you want slight lifts of the fingers to turn off the sensor, move it to the left. If you want to move your fingers substantially before deactivating the sensor, move it to the right. 

2. Flicker Guard Size (aka Hysteresis) - This makes the states (on vs off) a bit more sticky around your sensor range. The further this slider is to the right, the more sticky the sensor state is. Meaning, if the sensors are on and the slider is far to the right, you need to move your fingers further to turn them off. If you're looking for very snappy quick response, keep this low. If you're looking for very stable performance with no accidental activations, put it higher. 

As you adjust, the UI will provide real time feedback when the sensor is "on" (blue line on grips) vs "off"

Note: if you move the Flicker Size Guard slider all the way to the left, you may have issues with the grip sense flickering or responding to touch events on the trackpads or thumbstick. Moving it slightly to the right can help resolve this issue.

Learn more about Steam Controller on its product page, and keep an eye on the Steam Hardware Blog for other how-to guides and closer looks.

The Steam Controller has a gyroscope inside - a highly accurate sensor for detecting the controller's rotation. It allows you to do things in-game like:

• Control cameras in an exploration game

• Aim precisely in an FPS

• Move a mouse cursor around the screen for casual mouse focused games

• Turn a car's steering wheel/plane's yoke in driving/flying games

• And much more just by turning the controller! 

The past several years have seen a growing, avid userbase discovering the benefits of the gyroscope, showing that it has a high skill ceiling. When mastered, it can be as good as using a mouse - and often more fun!

It's worth noting that setting up the Gyro can sometimes require a lot of adjusting/testing and is generally game dependent as well, meaning you might need to tweak further for each game. 

This initial guide is meant to help you get started without too much tweaking needed. We'll also be doing a deeper dive on some of this sometime in the near future.

You can enable Gyro by choosing a Gyro Behavior Mode, either from the Quick Settings Menu:

...or inside the Edit Layout->Gyro screen:

The Gyro dropdown in the Controller Settings Quick Menu gives us 3 modes to play with (there are others which you can access in the gyro screen within Edit Layout, but this guide will focus on the three in the quick menu).

These translate gyro motions into virtual mouse or joystick movements

• Gyro to Mouse

  • Used to mimic a mouse cursor, or to control a camera (aiming)

• Gyro to Joystick (Camera)

  • Gyro Speed is used to rotate a standard joystick-driven camera.

• Gyro to Joystick (Deflection)

  • Turn the controller to simulate vehicle steering controls, or an airplane's yoke, via a virtual joystick.

Generally, Gyro to Mouse is recommended for the best game feel. There are two exceptions:

• If you want to simulate vehicle steering controls we recommend Gyro to Joystick (Deflection).

• If a game doesn't handle mixed input (simultaneous mouse and gamepad input) 

  • You can tell if this is a problem if the game behaves strangely when both gyro and joystick are moved at once: UI glyphs may flicker, or the camera's movement may stutter.

  • We have a couple of work-arounds to fix this:

    • Keep using Gyro to Mouse, but set up your configuration to mimic Keyboard and Mouse buttons only - the downside is that game may not display the gamepad button prompts.

    • If you want to keep the gamepad button glyphs, use Gyro to Joystick (camera). The downside is that this tends to take more setup to get the feel right, since every game treats the joystick response differently.

All three Gyro Modes give you options to temporarily turn off the gyroscope in order to "reset" your hands back to center after rotating too far - much like lifting a mouse to reset its position on your desktop. This is also known as "ratcheting".

We allow you to set this up with any button combination you like. We also provide some settings to adjust exactly how this works. You can get to this setting by clicking the gear next to the Gyro behavior drop down. 

This will take you to the Gyro settings menu, at the top you will see the gyro activation buttons options. 

1. Choose Gyro Button(s) - this is the button that will enable/disable gyro when pressed down. By default it is set to the touch sensor in the right trackpad and the touch sensor in the right thumbstick - same as the Steam Deck. As long as your finger is touching one of those things, the gyro will be enabled. 

2. Gyro Enable/Suppress/Toggle - by default the button you chose for item 1 will turn Gyro ON while the button is activated. You can set it to Suppress - meaning Gyro is always on UNLESS the button is currently activated. Or you can set it to Toggle, which will switch Gyro from on to off (or vice versa) on an activation. 

3. Multiple Gyro Button Behavior - if you have multiple buttons selected, this determines whether you need to be pressing/holding all of them or just one (any) of them.

Here is a quick set of instructions to get set up with our suggested options:

• Select the Choose Gyro Button(s) button (item 1 above).

• The Gyro Buttons popup appears: Select the button you'd like to control the gyro's activity. You can pick any combination. We recommend using both grip sensors for this; but triggers, trackpads or the capacitive stick sensors are also commonly used.

• Choose whether you want the buttons to Enable, Suppress, or Toggle the gyro by clicking on Gyro Enable/Suppress/Toggle (number 2 above). For this recommended set up, we suggest "Hold to Enable Gyro"

  

• (Optional) When you have multiple Gyro Buttons selected, you can choose "Any" or "All" buttons to Enable/Suppress/Toggle the gyro. When using the Grip Sensors, we recommend "All". Click in item 3 above to open up the options.

A note about Gyro haptics: Grip sensors don't have any physical feedback of their own (by design - holding in a button for a long time can be fatiguing!) but you can turn on a haptic effect to help physically confirm that they've registered a grip or release.

You can also turn on a haptic effect that will activate each time the controller rotates through an assigned angle, this gives you physical feedback as you rotate the controller.

• At the bottom of the Gyro settings screen you will see a haptics menu. They will be defaulted to "Off".
   

• If you turn item 1 or 2 to anything other than "off" new options will open up (see items 3 and 4 below):

  

• In items 3 and 4 you can adjust the settings for these haptics. 

All three gyro modes have these settings in common. Again, you can access these settings by clicking on the gear next to the Gyro behavior drop down. The sections that primarily affect sensitivity and other output modulations are shown below: 

1. Gyro Angles to Mouse Pixels: (Advanced) This setting is used to make real world angles line up with in-game angles - this takes some fine tuning so we recommend skipping for now.

2. Gyro Sensitivity: Higher values will make the camera (or mouse) move faster in response to your turns. This is going to be a new gyro user's primary slider to adjust when getting into a new game. We've found people gradually increase this as they start to get the hang of gyro.

3. Invert X/Y: Toggle these on to invert the Horizontal (X) or Vertical (Y) outputs.

4. Vertical/Horizontal Output Mixer: Moving the bar to the left will reduce vertical output, whereas moving it to the right will reduce horizontal output. Your wrists have more freedom of movement vertically than horizontally when holding the controller with both hands, so we recommend setting the slider toward the left side (reduced vertical output). Again, tune to taste.

5. Gyro Speed Deadzone: this is option 1 of 2 that can help you reduce tremors/shakes. This will entirely stop gyro output if the gyro moves slower than the given speed value. A high Deadzone will cause the gyro to feel a little unresponsive - most proficient users turn it to 0. It's still useful in "Drag and Drop" interfaces, so that you don't accidentally drag when you mean to click. Think of it as a way to simulate the friction of a mouse against a mouse pad.

6. Gyro Precision Speed: this is option 2 of 2 that can help you reduce tremors/shakes. Adjust this if you feel like your fast motions are good, but your fine/precise motions are too fast or a bit shaky. This will merely reduce the output movement when moving slower than the given speed. This can help you with fine movements, without a loss of perceived responsiveness. 

We'll share details about the advanced options and more in an advanced Steam Input setup guide coming soon.

As mentioned above, instead of setting your Gyro to mouse, you can also use one of the two Joystick modes.

Both modes mimic a joystick:

• Gyro to Joystick Camera: This maps the speed of the controller's rotation to the joystick's position. Turning your controller pushes the joystick in a direction; keeping your controller still brings the joystick back to its center.

• Gyro to Joystick Deflection: This mode maps the controller's relative rotation to that of the joystick. In this mode, rolling your controller left/right is like turning a steering wheel - the stick's position matches how far you've turned the controller from a starting point.

Unlike Gyro to Mouse mode, these modes won't trigger "Mixed Input" issues like "Button-Glyph Flickering" in a typical game.

The downside is that it can be difficult get a good feeling Gyro to Joystick mapping - this is dependent on how each game translates joystick input into camera movement, and how patient you are with tuning.

The most important value to tweak is the Minimum Joystick Output.

You are trying to make this line up with the game's joystick deadzone setting. A typical game will have a deadzone of anywhere between 20% to 45%. When correctly lined up, your smallest gyro movements should convert into the smallest detectable joystick readings in the game. This will take a lot of tweaking, but we suggest starting at around 30%.

While tweaking Gyro to Camera Joystick: small movements might be suppressed by the default gyro deadzones, and it's useful to turn the "Gyro Speed Deadzone" and "Gyro Precision Speed" to Zero so that even small movements are coming through. Once you have found the right joystick remapping values, remember to revert the “Gyro Speed Deadzone” and “Gyro Precision Speed” back to your preference.

In some games, you can find joystick deadzone settings - for the best gyro feel, we recommend that you reduce the in game deadzone as close to zero as it will go. If you do so, you may want to increase Steam Input's joystick deadzones to compensate, as a more sensitive in game joystick deadzone will result in more phantom movement from your joysticks.

For Gyro to Joystick Camera: We've seen some awesome community-made tutorials around this, and recommend looking around and learning from each other. We'll have more detailed guides covering more advanced aspects of gyro remapping in the future.

If your gyro is active and you're holding the controller still, but notice that your aim continuously drifts in one direction over time, you may be witnessing "Gyro Drift" - a very common phenomenon in gyro controllers, but also easily fixed.

Find the "Calibrate" button at the bottom of the Controller Settings-> Edit Layout-> Gyro Page

...Or at the bottom of the Controller Settings Quick Settings, or, alternatively, inside the Steam Controller Calibration settings.

Calibration requires you place the controller on a stable surface so that the drift can be detected and subtracted. Follow the wizard and within a few seconds, the drift should be gone.

If you still encounter drift, double check that the source of the drift isn't coming from your joysticks - you can temporarily set your Joystick mode to "None" to make sure.

Today, we're taking you on a journey through the beautiful Black Hills, one of South Dakota's most iconic regions, which we of course couldn't miss including in our upcoming South Dakota DLC for American Truck Simulator. From legendary Wild West history to breathtaking mountain highways, let us share some of the work our talented teams have done to faithfully recreate this beautiful region.

Spanning thousands of square miles across western South Dakota, the Black Hills are home to countless landmarks, historic towns, scenic byways & more. There's simply too much to cover in a single blog, so today we'd like to highlight just a small part of what you'll be able to discover. In this preview, we're taking a closer look at the historic town of Deadwood and one of the region's most scenic highways, US-385. 

Deadwood

Founded in 1876 during the Black Hills Gold Rush, Deadwood quickly became one of the American West's most famous frontier towns. What began as a small mining camp rapidly transformed into a bustling settlement filled with prospectors, merchants, and legendary figures such as Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. Today, its fascinating past continues to inspire films, television series, books, and Western enthusiasts from around the world.

As you roll into town, you'll be able to drive along Deadwood's famous historic Main Street, faithfully recreated by our map designers for you to enjoy. Lined with charming storefronts, local attractions, and beautifully preserved architecture, it's the perfect place to slow down and soak in the atmosphere of this historic and famous destination.


Keep an eye out for several recognizable landmarks as you pass through, including the Town Hall, Museum, historic Train Station, and many more carefully recreated buildings that help capture the unique character of this iconic Black Hills town.

US-385

The US-385 is one of South Dakota's most scenic highways. Winding through the heart of the Black Hills, this picturesque route takes you past rolling hills, dense pine forests, towering  igneous and metamorphic rock formations, and spectacular mountain vistas.


If you're lucky, you may even spot herds of bison grazing alongside the road, adding another memorable moment to your journey through this remarkable landscape.


One highlight along the route is the stunning Pactola Lake, the largest reservoir in the Black Hills. Nearby, you'll also find a visitor center overlooking the lake, offering panoramic views, surrounded by forested hills, making it the perfect place to pause before continuing your journey on the road.


Whether you're discovering the rich history of Deadwood or enjoying the scenic beauty of US-385, the Black Hills are certainly a destination you won't want to miss on your travels in South Dakota!


We look forward to sharing even more from this upcoming DLC for American Truck Simulator in the future. If you're excited to be haulin' in the Mount Rushmore State, be sure to add South Dakota to your Steam Wishlist, your support means a lot to us. Until next time, happy truckin’!