I’m going to ignore most of this because we’re going in circles.
If I were using Windows for example, I would download SteamControllerDriver.exe and, after installing that, the controller would work with all of its features enabled in any game I run in any client (or no client at all if it’s DRM free).
What is all of its features to you? It already sends different inputs on all of its different buttons and sensors, games can receive those inputs they’re just weird because they’re not what you expect them to be. If it were to behave like a controller it wouldn’t allow you to send mouse or use the back buttons or trackpad since controllers don’t have this, so you would be losing of features. The only way to access those features is to have an intermediate layer doing the remapping and translation, which is why I said that the Steam controller doesn’t make sense without SteamInput.
And the thing that you’re missing is that in order to allow the community to easily build that software (which it has been done for the OG controller) the controller needs to behave exactly the way it does. If it were to map itself to a controller on a hardware level so that the OS picks it up as a controller then it would lose the ability to be remapped. Take most other controllers with back buttons out there and try to write a driver for them that allows you to use the back buttons and you’ll understand
I’m going to ignore most of this because we’re going in circles.
What is all of its features to you? It already sends different inputs on all of its different buttons and sensors, games can receive those inputs they’re just weird because they’re not what you expect them to be. If it were to behave like a controller it wouldn’t allow you to send mouse or use the back buttons or trackpad since controllers don’t have this, so you would be losing of features. The only way to access those features is to have an intermediate layer doing the remapping and translation, which is why I said that the Steam controller doesn’t make sense without SteamInput.
And the thing that you’re missing is that in order to allow the community to easily build that software (which it has been done for the OG controller) the controller needs to behave exactly the way it does. If it were to map itself to a controller on a hardware level so that the OS picks it up as a controller then it would lose the ability to be remapped. Take most other controllers with back buttons out there and try to write a driver for them that allows you to use the back buttons and you’ll understand