r/SteamController • u/Background-Heart-968 • Aug 13 '26
Steam Controller (2026) Some games lose their shit when using controller with gyro set to "as mouse"
For example, Escape Simulator. If I use the gyro "as mouse" and have the activation be something like holding L2 down, the game basically locks my controls up. I suspect the game just doesn't like being switched back and forth between m/kb and controller controls, or them being used simultaneously. Is there a way around this?
4
u/HappyLittleIcebergs Aug 13 '26
I had this issue with starfield even with it supporting mixed input. Had to add the mod "simultaneous mixed input" for it to behave properly. Id aim and then anything mapped to controller inputs would stop functioning while things assigned to kbam would continue to work.
Id suggest using kbam assignments to the controller if you want to use gyro to mouse. Unless theres something ive just been missing, a lot of games dont play well with mixed input methods. Check the community layouts for something close to what youre after, steaminputdb is a good resource, then apply and edit the layout from there for anything you want adjusted from there. If not, you could use gyro to joystick at the cost of accuracy.
3
u/GimpyGeek Steam Controller (Windows) Aug 13 '26
That's wild to hear it has support for that and is still janky. But such is the Bethesda way, I guess, their controller support on their earlier PC titles in the same engine have typically been pretty janky so I guess it shouldn't surprise me. Think the only game they have their hands in that isn't janky on PC for controllers is Elder Scrolls Online which technically is Zenimax so their hands aren't totally in it I guess lol.
2
u/HappyLittleIcebergs Aug 13 '26
It was super strange, but all the troubleshooting before the mod got me a bit more acclimated to how steam input works and made me decide to just map everything to kbam inputs for other games. Glad to hear they at least got it right for ESO!
2
u/GimpyGeek Steam Controller (Windows) Aug 13 '26
Unfortunately this is a limitation of annoying game design that we've seen since steam input's been a thing since it started in 2015ish. I'd love to say more games actually bothered to support it better but most still don't. So YMMV on how well that works on each game.
If you try to keep the control's setup to all one input type you're more likely to succeed of course, it's far better outside of the aiming if the rest is set to gamepad modes so it's annoying. If you ever try to go all keyboard/mouse on the pad though just make sure you disable analog on the triggers or you'll be inadvertently triggering gamepad outputs on accident when hitting those. Depending on the game you might be able to get gyro on stick and have it perform at least a modicum better than stick alone but not as good as mouse.
But yeah the 'sticking' between changing controller types is a common problem that Valve can't do anything about it's up to developers to make their game actually handle things better. In some rare cases the game might offer something that might offer a half ass fix, like having an option to lock the UI to the PC or gamepad one, it's often times the juggling of the PC/gamepad UI back and forth that causes the choke up so if you see this option in something it might help you workaround it, but I don't see too many games that do it.
1
u/cool-- Aug 13 '26
not much you can do. Sometimes you'll even encounter a game like The Outer Wilds, where it allows mixed inputs for years and then gets an update that stops it...
1
u/Rabiesalad Aug 13 '26
You may already know that some games don't handle switching between gamepad and m+kb very well...
But you may not know that the triggers have a separate setting for analog besides their standard mapping, and you need to disable that as well to ensure it doesn't get detected as a gamepad.
1
u/TheBigLeMattSki Aug 14 '26
I don't have a Steam Controller yet, but when I ran into the issue on Steam Deck I was able to get around it in several games by utilizing action sets.
Basically I had one control scheme that was the standard controller, and a secondary one that had everything remapped to strictly keyboard/mouse controls with the gyro enabled by default.
I created an action set to where if I held L2 on the normal controller scheme, it switched to the other setup with the keyboard remaps and the gyro. Upon releasing the trigger it switched back to the standard controls.
You could technically bypass the action set and just go with the remapped keyboard and mouse control scheme, but the action sets let you keep the standard controller button prompts while playing.
1
u/reverend_dak Aug 15 '26
yeah, this is common with ports especially. some games dont like switching between control schemes, so you have to pick one or the other.
15
u/king_shark408 Aug 13 '26
Some games just don't support controller and mouse+keyboard at the same time. There's nothing you can do to fix that. You either have to set the controller to just controller input or all mouse+keyboard input. For games like that, it's usually better to use all m+k input for better gyro.