Factorio Forums

Hi, big fan, good work on the deck controls. I often build in map view (or editor for BPs), and on keyboard/mouse I can use wasd to move perfectly in a straight line, for example to place a line of concrete perfectly horizontally.

On Steam Deck, I move the map with the left joystick. That's of course prone to some imprecision by virtue of being analog. However on the Steam Deck I can also remap the controls so that I use the left d-pad to emulate a Joystick. That's what I've done, but there's something curious about it. Here's a video showing movement controls first outside of map view (pure d-pad), then inside map view (dpad emulating joystick and limited to perfect X/Y axes):
As you can see, even though I'm moving only left and right, there's "drift", depending on a factor that's unclear to me. I presume the Steam deck sends perfectly horizontal or vertical joystick emulated signals to Factorio (but could be wrong), yet there's some veering off the cardinal directions when panning.

Is this a limitation on part of Factorio, or on the Steam Deck?

And if it's on the part of Steam Deck, is there an alternative solution I can use? What I really want is to be able to move perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical in the map view, but without switching to keyboard/mouse controls. A solution, for example, could be to have options for pan left, right, up, down, inside the controller settings, in addition to the singular stick control that's there now. Possibly related post.

Thanks for reading!

An update: my unique proposition of treating the d-pad as a joystick in order to pan perfectly straight does seem to have been affected by the steam deck's particular controls implementation. And I got it to work, through recasting in Steam Deck settings the joystick as a d-pad, but with the 4 d-pad directions mapped to the joystick:
Pretty roundabout, yes, and not very intuitive, though it does precisely address the need I outlined here.

That said, this suggestion still makes sense to me, and might make a more intuitive way to allow this to happen:

A solution, for example, could be to have options for pan left, right, up, down, inside the controller settings, in addition to the singular stick control that's there now.

What I believe is happening is that Steam Input is adding stick input from d-pad to the actual stick input. The actual stick is not perfectly at 0,0 so some drift is added.
The game ignores small input according to the deadzone setting, but once the entire stick vector is large enough, the small stick error is also allowed.
As far as Factorio is concerned, I believe everything is working correctly.

Maybe there is a way to set a deadzone in the Steam Input so it's applied before adding the stick input from the dpad. Just set the deadzone in Factorio to 0 so you don't lose too much precision.

Thanks for looking. I tend to think you're right in the assessment. I did try a deadzone of zero, that didn't work either, though changing the joystick to a dpad mapped to joystick directions as shown above serves as a fine workaround for now. It does mean I can only pan in precisely 8 directions on the map, and only with a single fixed speed, but that's fine for now. What do you think about having additional fallback directional map panning controls? Honestly they could even map to the character movement controls.