Better offline controller support is now offered

Mar 11, 2017 01:58 GMT  ·  By

Valve pushed a new stable update for the Steam Client for Linux, Mac, and Windows users, as well as on its Debian-based SteamOS gaming operating system, adding, as expected, numerous improvements and some new exciting features.

The March 9 Steam Client Update is awaiting you next time you fire up your Steam desktop client, no matter the operating system you're currently using, and it will add a new option in the settings that lets you disable group announcement and event notifications, and removes the sing-on notifications for in-game/online friends.

Among other general improvements, Valve's engineers managed to improve the error handling for game files that are locked by other apps during an update, as well as the sort order of your gaming library to also detect games that start with Unicode characters or punctuation in their names.

Of course, lots of bugs were squashed in this stable update for all supported platforms, and a couple of issues have also been resolved for macOS users. Furthermore, the Big Picture mode gained a confirmation that should appear just before Restarting, Suspending, or Shutting Down the client from the system menu.

Lots of Steam Controller improvements

That's right, there are lots of Steam Controller improvements in this new stable Steam Client update, starting with better offline support for controller configurations and personalization, which can now be downloaded for offline use, support for previewing controller configs when importing them, and Steam Controller configuration links.

"When browsing configurations, a link can now be copied to the clipboard by pressing the Start button or Control+C. Following this Steam link will how the configuration and it can be optionally applied to the game it corresponds to. This link can be opened via a browser or at the command-line," reads the changelog.

It's also possible to vote controller configurations, as well as to sort them by votes instead of usage. Moreover, it looks like the default sorting of controller configurations now uses a rolling 30-day window showing the most popular ones of the last 30 days first, and Lock Gyro support was added to the Extents option for Joystick Move.

And that's not all, because there's also support for multiple additional PlayStation 4 and third-party PlayStation 4-style controllers, audio support for the official DS4 v2 Slim controllers, a brand-new mouse dampening option for the Mouse Region mode, and power-off timeout functionality for wireless PlayStation 4 controllers.

Some enhancements and bug fixes were also implemented for the In-Home Streaming and Steam VR features, and you should update your Steam Client as soon as possible. If you didn't get a notification, go to the Steam menu and click on the "Check for Steam Client Updates" entry. Make sure you restart your Steam Client to apply the update. Have fun and check out the full release notes below for more details.

Steam Client Update March 9