If I'm getting this right, he's saying that the fact that the touchpads are "clickable" made it into a pretty-good d-pad after they disabled the response to touch-only movement. That is, he could rest his thumb on the touchpad (like you would a d-pad) and then have it only respond to the "direction" of his press when he pushed hard enough for the click. In this state it seemed to satisfy him as a proper hardcore d-pad.
That's really neat. I wonder how many fake "buttons" you can map onto the touch-surface before it starts getting crowded. 4? 8? 9?
I see the challenge, though, with providing some kind of "nubs" without screwing up its usability as a pointer-surface. Even switching betweeen smooth/rough in the button-zones or putting simple bulges could make it feel bad as a pointer.
I don't think it's as simple as making a touch sensitive surface map for buttons. Take this for exampe:
in Xbox controller, you can have you thumb touching "a" and "b" at the same time, while you can either click "a" or "b" while touching another. Try doing that on a steam controller.
That's really neat. I wonder how many fake "buttons" you can map onto the touch-surface before it starts getting crowded. 4? 8? 9?
I see the challenge, though, with providing some kind of "nubs" without screwing up its usability as a pointer-surface. Even switching betweeen smooth/rough in the button-zones or putting simple bulges could make it feel bad as a pointer.