Steam input - user idle detection

[leadcage]

I am seeking technical assistance regarding Steam Input.

I am a developer of an application which is used by tens of thousands of people and one of the features rely on win32 GetLastInputInfo() to detect when the last keyboard, mouse or controller input was made, to detect when the user becomes idle. However, GetlastInputInfo() is never updated/triggered by games using Steam Input. I'm guessing you are capturing the input before windows knows about it.

How would I go about to detect when the user made the last input using steam input? No need to know specific buttons etc, just the time when the last input was made. I could probably use raw input but I'd like to avoid that for specific reasons.

Any assistance that you can provide would be very beneficial for me and the users of my app. Cheers!

[austinp_valve]

We don't generate events that GetLastInputInfo would read when emulating a gamepad through the overlay or when a game reads input via Steam Input API. There's some cases where it might work, ex: an Xbox controller would probably end up having activity just due to the normal Windows internal functions and we'd also end up sending events when emulating mouse/kb. but it's not a very good solution. We do call SetThreadExecutionState to keep the computer from going to sleep/turning off the display, but I don't see an easy way for an external tool to detect that.