Dylan Deverill
bd4206e891
The per-game picker drew on two sources: a Start Menu shortcut walk and the installed MSIX package list. Issue #83 is a user whose app never appeared in it, asking to just point at an .exe. Two structural gaps sat behind that. Launcher-installed games were missing or wrong. Epic shortcuts a game with a .url carrying a com.epicgames.launcher:// URI, and the walk keeps only .url files pointing at Steam, so Epic games were dropped outright — Among Us was invisible on the machine this was written on. Battle.net and Ubisoft write .lnk files targeting the launcher executable with a per-game argument, and IShellLink::GetPath returns only the executable, so a whole Blizzard library collapsed into one wrongly-named "Battle.net Launcher.exe" entry. LauncherGames reads what each launcher records about itself instead: Epic's .item manifests, GOG's and Ubisoft's registry keys, Battle.net's uninstall entries. Those name an install directory rather than an executable, which is the better identity anyway and gets a fourth game-id shape, "dir:". A game folder holds its launcher, its anti-cheat service and the game itself, and which of them reaches the foreground varies by title and by moment — the same reasoning SteamAppLocator already documents for Steam, and MatchProfile resolves these by longest path prefix for the same reason. Nothing without an installer entry could be listed at all, which is the long tail the issue is really about. The picker now offers the applications with a window open right now, and a file browser, both producing an ordinary exe-path id that needed no new plumbing. The running list is the more useful of the two: it asks the user to know nothing about where a game was installed. Also moves the enumeration off the UI thread. It measured 1.4s warm and 5s cold before this change added five sources to it, and OpenRemapWindow was calling it synchronously — the window did not appear until it finished. Fixes #83
SteamlessController
A lightweight Windows system tray app that lets you use a Steam Controller as a standard gamepad — without Steam running.
When Steamless Mode is active, the app disables the controller's built-in keyboard/mouse emulation (lizard mode) and exposes it as a virtual Xbox 360 controller (or PlayStation controller) via ViGEmBus, making it compatible with any game that supports the Xbox or PlayStation controller.
Features
- Supports all connection modes! Puck, wired, and Bluetooth!
- Runs alongside Steam! No need to close Steam to toggle modes or force you to use your PC in a weird way.
- Brand new extensive remapping controls for back buttons and trackpads. Save custom mappings and load them per game!
- Enable/Disable manually, or use new auto modes to turn on / off when it makes sense.
- Start on launch, suppress notifications, make this utility your own.
Requirements
To run
- Windows 10 or later (64-bit)
- ViGEmBus driver installed
- Steam Controller — wired USB (PID
0x1302), wireless dongle (PID0x1304), or Bluetooth LE (PID0x1303, pair via Windows Bluetooth settings) - Steam closed (Steam claims the controller when running)
To build
- Visual Studio 2022 with the Desktop development with C++ workload
- CMake 3.20 or later (included with Visual Studio, or install separately)
- Windows SDK 10.0.22000 or later (installed via Visual Studio Installer)
Building
git clone https://github.com/your-username/SteamlessController.git
cd SteamlessController
cmake -B build
cmake --build build --target SteamlessController
The executable will be at build\Debug\SteamlessController.exe.
For a release build:
cmake -B build/release -G "Visual Studio 18 2025"
cmake --build build/release --config Release --target SteamlessController
If you have Visual Studio 2022, replace
"Visual Studio 18 2025"with"Visual Studio 17 2022".
Building the installer
The installer is compiled from resources\InnoInstallerScript.iss with Inno Setup. It needs two things a fresh clone does not have.
Release builds of all three executables it packages. The command in the previous section builds only the tray app:
cmake --build build/release --config Release --target SteamlessController
cmake --build build/release --config Release --target SteamlessDeviceCycle
cmake --build build/release --config Release --target ViGEmBusProbe
SteamlessDeviceCycle is the elevated helper that restarts the controller's device node. ViGEmBusProbe is how Setup checks whether the driver actually installed, and it stays in the install folder afterwards as a diagnostic.
The ViGEmBus driver installer, which is not in this repository — it is a 6 MB vendored binary, and *.exe is gitignored. Download it from ViGEmBus releases and place it here:
resources\ViGEmBus_1.22.0_x64_x86_arm64.exe
The filename must match #define ViGEmSetup at the top of the script. Inno resolves [Files] sources when it compiles, so a missing or differently named payload fails the build outright rather than producing an installer that silently ships no driver. If you update the ViGEmBus version, change the #define to match the new filename.
CMake Targets
| Target | Description |
|---|---|
SteamlessController |
Main system tray application |
SteamlessDeviceCycle |
Elevated helper that disables and re-enables the controller's device node, run as an on-demand scheduled task. Shipped by the installer. |
ViGEmBusProbe |
Reports whether a ViGEm bus is present by enumerating its interface. Used by Setup to verify the driver installed, and shipped as a diagnostic. |
SteamProbe |
Console diagnostic tool — dumps raw HID report bytes as you interact with the controller. Useful for protocol research. |
RawControllerProbe |
Checks whether Windows.Gaming.Input.RawGameController can enumerate the Steam Controller (requires WinRT). |
GameLibraryProbe |
Console diagnostic — lists every application the per-game profile picker can find, with the source each came from and a per-source count. Ask for its output when someone reports that a game is missing from the picker. Given a directory, it instead runs only the Epic manifest reader against it. |
How it works
The Steam Controller exposes a vendor HID collection (usage page 0xFF00) that carries all game input in a 54-byte report (ID 0x42) at ~60 Hz. By default the firmware runs in lizard mode, emulating a keyboard and mouse so the controller works without drivers.
SteamlessController sends HID feature reports to disable lizard mode, then reads the raw input reports and translates them into a virtual Xbox 360 controller via ViGEmBus. A background heartbeat re-sends the disable command every 800 ms to keep lizard mode off.
The full input report layout is documented in src/steam/SteamController.h.
Per-game profiles
A profile can be attached to one game instead of applying everywhere. The game
is chosen from a picker that draws on several sources at once: both Start Menu
and both Desktop shortcut folders, the installed MSIX/Store package list, Steam's
own manifests, and the records kept by the Epic Games Store, GOG Galaxy, Ubisoft
Connect and Battle.net. Anything none of those know about — a portable build, an
emulator, an itch.io download — can be added by hand, either by picking it out of
the applications currently running or by browsing to its .exe.
Whichever profile applies is decided by what is in the foreground, not by what
is running: a launcher that stays resident long after the game exits would
otherwise keep claiming the controller. See
src/app/ForegroundWatcher.h for why, and
src/app/GameLibrary.h for the four shapes a game's
saved identity can take.
Third-party
- ViGEmClient — MIT License, built from source as a static library