External Controller Joystick Centering Calibration Removed Alongside Legacy Big Picture

[Leoidon]

The old "Big Picture Mode" for the Steam app, before it was replaced with "Gaming Mode" for SteamOS, had an option to calibrate the centering and outer edges of external controller joystick like the Switch Pro controller. You would press in the joystick in different directions 10 times, and that allowed Steam to "map out" what the joystick reported as "fully pressed" in different directions.

This is calibration fixes a problem where you "fully push" the joystick in a specific direction, but Steam reads the joystick as only "partially pushed" in that direction. Without being able to calibrate the joystick, an external controller's analog stick might not allow you to "run" in specific direction because you can't get the stick to register as "fully tilted" in that direction without calibration.

It looks like this calibration feature was removed when the legacy Big Picture Mode was removed from the Steam Deck. The deadzone calibration that is present in the latest SteamOS version is not enough to fix centering/outer range issues for external controllers.

Does Valve have plans to add this feature back to the Steam Deck? It's strange that the removed legacy Big Picture before making sure that they had complete feature parity with the Gaming Mode settings that replaced it.

[MartyWF]

You can select the deadzones in the joystick settings in the controller layout ( whatever controller layout you want ), just make sure it is not set to none, use default or custom. When you select one of these two you can test them right in the layout, and adjust the settings till they are the way you want. If this does not work so well use custom deadzones so you can tweak them as you want them to be.

Cheers and Good Luck Dude

[Leoidon]

Thanks, this works. Looks like deadzone settings have a "Max Output" deadzone (outer ring of joystick), a "Output Ramp" deadzone (middle ring of joystick) and "No Output" deadzone (inner ring of joystick). To fix my issue I needed to make the "Max Output" deadzone larger so that it would register in the direction of joystick tilting that didn't "reach" that deadzone otherwise.

I do hope that we can eventually do some sort of calibration universally, so you don't have to modify Controller Settings for each game. But this works for now at least.

[MartyWF]

Glad I could help

[Thanone]

hey, ik I'ma year late, but how did you calibrate them? I recently installed halleffect joysticks in my switch joycons, it works fine after calibrating on my switch but ironically it drifts to hell and back on steamos