Left 4 Dead 2 Adds Native Steam Controller & Surround Sound Support On SteamOS

"I actually played Left 4 Dead 2 to death"

I got 1,400 hours in L4D2, and play it with some nice folks who also passed 1,000 hours. One of them have more than 4,000 hours. So we think it is a nice game...

Surround sound. Great to hear that they are still working on it. Its a shame that so many ports do not bother to implement this important feature (I am looking at you Aspyr). But stay away from using optical connection with you surround sound system in Linux. Things are a mess right now and some home theaters will add lag to the audio.

And lets hope that Valve will implement a better gamepad control scheme for their games, because using separate buttons to reload and open doors in a modern game is ridiculous.

Off Topic:

Trine 3 is out of beta.

After the 44 MB patch, the sound is not surround yet and the buttons scheme are still bad. Good work Valve...

And lets hope that Valve will implement a better gamepad control scheme for their games, because using separate buttons to reload and open doors in a modern game is ridiculous.

How would reload while standing infront of a door?

Speaking of surround sound, I played my first game with it in 2004, it was Doom 3 with a SB Audigy 2 ZS.
Eleven (!!!) years later I still use the same audio card (lol), but we have just a handful of games that support positional audio under Linux.
I just bought A:I and sadly discovered that surround doesn't work under Linux. I don't need to tell anybody how important surround audio is for a survival horror game, do I.
So I had to reinstall the game under Windows and now I can play it in all its magnificency (is it a word?). What a game!

And lets hope that Valve will implement a better gamepad control scheme for their games, because using separate buttons to reload and open doors in a modern game is ridiculous.

How would reload while standing infront of a door?

Looks like you didn't played a lot of action FPS games, to make a question like that...

The thing is that there is a default control layout for these games, even 3rd person shooters. The button you use for action, like pic up items, open doors, activate switches AND reload your weapon is the same button, in the case of Xbox and Steam controllers, the X button (□ in the Playstation).

Every major title, like Call of Duty, Borderlands, etc, have this behavior for the X button. But some genius at Valve like to make things differently and makes playing Valve's games very annoying for gamepad players. You now, the ones they are targeting with the whole SteamOS/Machines. You don't want to make you finger memory confused when things get hot in L4D2, believe me.

"I actually played Left 4 Dead 2 to death"

There was me thinking no one would pick up on that ^_^

I will have a Steam Controller guaranteed on Tuesday now, so my thoughts will be up this week! I will be sure to include this game now.

Speaking of surround sound, I played my first game with it in 2004, it was Doom 3 with a SB Audigy 2 ZS.
Eleven (!!!) years later I still use the same audio card (lol), but we have just a handful of games that support positional audio under Linux.
I just bought A:I and sadly discovered that surround doesn't work under Linux. I don't need to tell anybody how important surround audio is for a survival horror game, do I.
So I had to reinstall the game under Windows and now I can play it in all its magnificency (is it a word?). What a game!

THIS.

Like a lot of things you experiment, surround sound is a thing you didn't want to give up once you got it.

I have a old set of speakers, and wanted to buy some nice home theater to use optical (SPDIF) connection for better quality. So I borrow a HT from a friend and I found that this connection is not a plug and play option in Linux, yet. Video players don't work, games too, and the ones that do have a 2-300 ms of audio lag, very annoying. I tested 2 Phillips home theaters and a expensive Yamaha receiver, all with the same lag. Only a Logitech kit worked okay, without lag, but the software problem continues. Some games work (like Counter Strike:GO) and others didn't. Even in Windows some games (the Codemasters ones) won't work with optical connection. In the end, I have to conform and keep my old set, it gives me a lot less headaches.

And lets hope that Valve will implement a better gamepad control scheme for their games, because using separate buttons to reload and open doors in a modern game is ridiculous.

I fail to see how that's ridiculous.

And lets hope that Valve will implement a better gamepad control scheme for their games, because using separate buttons to reload and open doors in a modern game is ridiculous.

I fail to see how that's ridiculous.

Do you have experience with joypads with FPS games? For a mouse and keyboard player (I am), different buttons for action (E) and reload (R) are the norm. But for gamepad players is not. It breaks the finger memory and make your experience with the game a miserable one.

About surround : honestly, I have a nice (but aging, and looking to replace it) 5.1 Medusa headset. I used to configure the surround feature in windows, but it didn't work with every game. Then, I completely switched to Linux, configured my headset with ALSA, and everything was working fine with the very few titles that supported surround. Then I heard about HRTF, and after configuring the required bits in openAL, I found it so much better than the real 5.1 that I completely disabled it, reverting to a 2-channel audio configuration.

Granted, HRTF only works with headsets, but 5.1 setups don't work that well when there are some people around either. The best solution would be to use a headphone plug in the controller itself. Maybe with something like a palm reader on the controller to identify players, and switching to their HRTF profile. (I don't mean to use the palm reader to log them in, but to identify which available profile uses which controller, a bit like they did on the 360. A central fingerprint reader or whatever might also do the trick).

Nowadays, I use Pulseaudio, and my headset is so full of bad contacts anyway that turning my head right or left changes the balance between channels :/

Now, about L4D2 : I hope they added a splitscreen mode. Last time I checked, there was one, but you had to use the console to access it, and it was a suboptimal experience. I hope that they will add this to all their games. And that everyone else will follow.

EDIT : On the buttons topic, I think it really depends on the game. For example, Halo (the first one) on PC uses two different keys for action and reload, even though pressing action when there is nothing to do reloads your weapon.
On Xbox, the game tells you to keep pressing the button on your controller to perform an action, and to quickly press it to reload. I guess the fact that the first Xbox had pression-sensitive buttons might have helped at the time. Moreover, console games tend to be slower-paced than PC games. Thus, pressing a button a bit longer is not crucial.
One could argue that if you have to press a button to open a door, the game is not fast paced anyway. But in my opinion, the game should offer both control schemes (and valve games always let you edit the key bindings by hand, if necessary).


Last edited by MayeulC on 7 November 2015 at 4:51 pm UTC

I got 1,400 hours in L4D2, and play it with some nice folks who also passed 1,000 hours. One of them have more than 4,000 hours. So we think it is a nice game...

Just 227 hours here. No joke, I tested Left4Dead2 with the steam controller shortly after its release, cause Dota2 with controller is impossible (don't want to loose all my MMR). It was ok then, very much playable to me. Used a profile from the community and increased tp sensitivity.

I hope you killed them to death.

The Steam Controller might take a week or more to adjust to. Just warning you, in case you plan to post some early impressions which are unfavorable. After the initial learning curve, it's fanfreakingtastic, and the fact that I can play keyboard and mouse-driven games on my couch without having to screw around with AntiMicro or the like using a keyboard and mouse all the time is literally a game-changer.

Quite liking my Steam Controller with games, now that Portal 2's official multi-tiered controller setup is fixed now (wasn't working for me before). I even got most of my "tweaks" to memory for when I setup a new game. Really loving it. So happy I can now play mouse adventures as well, like Grim Fandango.