Krejlooc said:
See that big, round, circular pad directly above the thing you're wishing was a d-pad? The thing your thumb naturally extends over? It acts as a d-pad.
And contrary to what someone else posted earlier in this thread, the touchpads are suitable for platformers.
You can also use the cell phone screen as such, but a flat surface doesn't look like the best substitute for a physical D-pad to me.
the difference being a cell phone screen is touch activated and provides no tactile feedback aside from vibrations, where the touchpads can be switch activated to provide a real, literal, physical button depressing.
In other words, the difference between sliding over glass with every slightes contact being represented as input, and depressing an actual button on the left side of the pad to move left, with only that button being depressed being recognized as input.
Which is a pretty huge difference.
Why do those directions need to be separate buttons, anyway? I just can't see an actual benefit to it.
Because they're not directions as separate buttons. They're a cluster of 4 buttons that are labeled with directions. And I explained why they "need" to be like that - because a d-pad resides in that location on most other controllers and developers/beta testers demanded a consistent labeling scheme to make on-screen prompts match in games with legacy support.
EDIT: To explain better, because people honestly still sound confused about how the touchpads work and feel (and because a number of people parrot incorrect inferences about the way the touchpads feel based off of visual inspection -- I.e. "the pad can't be used for fighting games very well"):
The two touchpads are actually two dish-shaped giant buttons that physically depress. They have the throw of an average playstation or xbox or nintendo or sega controller button, to the touch, when you depress them, they feel like giant, concave buttons in the center of the controller where your thumbs rest. The surface of these buttons is a capacitive touchpad, meaning that these two buttons can tell where your fingers are on the button.
These two buttons are attached to powerful and advanced actuators that provide haptic feedback. Most people don't fully understand what haptic feedback is - the most complex haptic feedback that most people have felt is rumble from a controller or phone, which is blunt and not directed. The haptic feedback in these touchpads is much more advanced - in addition to being able to set duration and strength, you can also set sound and direction of feedback. So, where in a typical controller you feel blunt rumble - a sort of blob of haptic feedback that just occurs in every direction in your hand - these touchpads give you localized rumble that only each thumb feels, and that rumble has direction.
There appears to be a lot of myth and misunderstanding about how this haptic feedback feels to the user. I'll admit my previous vocabulary in talks (not necessarily on this board) may not have conveyed the sensation these cause well enough, so I'll be more deliberate with my words. You don't feel buttons or shapes with this haptic feedback - haptic feedback won't make you believe there is a smaller, circular button residing in the top portion of the right touchpad where the triangle button would reside on a playstation pad. Haptic feedback isn't that advanced yet.
What haptic feedback can make you feel, however, is inertia and motion. You've no doubt heard people lament about how good the right touchpad feels as a replacement for the mouse, because when they swipe their finger across it, they feel like the pad is spinning in that direction. They can feel it spinning, they hear it spinning. Their thumb feels like it's in a trackball, and that trackball is rotating in the socket. That's the direction of the haptic feedback. By vibrating localized portions of the pad in concert, and moving the areas that are vibrating, it can simulate the feeling of inertia. Given the dished shape of the pads, this translates, in our heads, to the feeling of controlling a ball. We can spin the ball in any direction we wish, and we'll swear we're feeling a physical ball spinning in the direction our thumb swiped.
Haptic feedback is not the solution to making you feel like you're depressing a button. But the good news is that the thing this haptic feedback is occurring on is a button. A large one that takes up the amount of space that d-pad or analog stick would. Even better is that the same effect we use to make us believe we are spinning a ball with our thumbs can be clubbed and shortened to feel like we are rocking a ball around a pivot. Doing so is very simple to do, and valve's own legacy support already includes this. When I move my thumb the left side of the left pad, I feel like the pad is rocking to the left. I feel like it's shifted and now my thumb is slightly tilting the entire pad to the left, like a rocker d-pad would feel.
Now here's the current problem - valve's legacy support accepts input upon contact with the touchpad. In other words, it ignores the fact that they are buttons, and instead activates upon contact. So, while I still can feel the pad rocking in place, it's too slippery and I can't rest my thumb anywhere without recording input.
The good news is that A) valve has a mode in beta where you need to press the button to activate input, turning the touchpad into a large, physical d-pad that they demoed to the super meatboy devs, and B) devs like myself are making the preference for an activator switch heard and, at least recently on the steamOS dev forum, they said they're working on bringing such a mode to public.
To conclude, when you combine the need to physically depress the button to activate input, combined with the ability to make it feel as though you are rocking the touchpad around a central pivot, along with the physical groves on the touchpad that you use to orient yourself, you find functionality that is as good as any d-pad out there. I know, I've tried it myself. I've done tests using this setup in native mode. It honestly works.
Anybody bitching because those 4 buttons in a diamond formation, labeled up, down, left, and right, won't feel like, say, the sega saturn d-pad and thus won't be suitable for platformers or fighting games or whatever are missing the point. You already HAVE a d-pad of that quality right in front of you. This stuff is still in development, that's why it's not in stores right now. The kinda of kinks I'm describing are precisely why it's in beta, so they can be ironed out by launch.
tl;dr: the touchpads can actually be superb d-pads, and everything you want the 4 buttons to be.
