Steam Controller: Valve Builds ‘Portal’ Assembly Line To Build Controllers For Steam Machines; Updates On Controller Released
Fans were delighted to preview Valve's assembly line in creating their newly unveiled controllers for Steam Machines, which looked a lot similar to one of the company's game title, "Portal".
In recent news, Valve (creators of the widely popular games such as "Portal", "Counter-Strike", "DoTA 2", and "Team Fortress") released a video showing how its Steam Controllers are made, what materials they are made from, and what makes them, according to Gamespot.
Fans familiar with the game "Portal" might see that the controller-building robots that comprise of the production line will look similar to it, as stated by the source.
Just like most manufacturing plants and factories around the world, the company's assembly line is an incredibly bright and sanitary space with more robotics than humanoids, which almost looks like the perfect home for GLaDOS, as reported by Kotaku.
"To achieve our goal of a flexible controller, we felt it was important to have a similar amount of flexibility in our manufacturing process, and that meant looking into automated assembly lines," the company wrote on their video description, courtesy of the source.
"It turns out that most consumer hardware of this kind still has humans involved in stages throughout manufacturing, but we kind of went overboard, and built one of the largest fully automated assembly lines in the United States," Valve added.
The specifications and details of the controller are detailed below, as reviewed by PC World.
Button pad: a bit less natural, but simply put users can map out four additional A/B/X/Y buttons to the controller's pad, which is especially useful for keyboard-heavy game titles with a lot of hotkeys involved.
Joystick move/camera: it tries to emulate the behavior of a joystick by making players move or turn faster as the thumb gets closer to the edge of the pad. However, Valve still included an actual analog stick to the controller.
Directional pad: as self-explanatory as it is, Valve added a haptic pad with a D-pad shaped crossed embedded on it.
Scroll wheel: this is the user's mouse's scroll wheel function but executed via the trackpad.
Mouse: This is where the controller excels at because the right haptic pad functions similar to a trackball.
In addition, valve recently announced that it has released an update for its controller that aims to make playing games like first-person shooter and real-time strategy games easier, as stated by Gamespot.
The update added gave the controller better aiming, customizations, and included mouse regions where players can assign a trackpad to a specific part of the display screen, similar to how mini-maps are in RTS games, as detailed by the source.
Future updates have also been promised along with the upcoming Steam beta client, courtesy of the source.
