Gamescope unfocused yet recieving gamepad input

[rscottyy]

I am trying to setup a workspace that has two windows: Kodi & Steam (under gamescope).

Whilst Kodi is focused it behaves and responds to my gamepad input. Whilst gamescope is unfocused it misbehaves and snatches all gamepad input.

It ruins my dreams to have a cohesive console-like living-room experience.

it's sad that a small problem with focus has such a devastating effect on my idea.

I was thinking I would have to use IR controllers with kodi instead of my xbox controller and I really don't want it to come down to that but I have no choice.

[misyltoad]

This is just because the app thinks it's always focused when run under gamescope, which is intentional.

Gamescope is mainly made for games, which really don't like not being focused. It would be possible to make app focus state be affected by whether the gamescope window is focused, but we really wouldn't want that for games.

[ghost]

I can understand, with the steam deck in particular, why it would be important to not lose focus. This 'all-focus' behavior should be enabled by default as it will cause issues with many wine titles and could be a nuisance for steamdeck users. A simple (true/false) flag in the arguments to disable this behavior, should be noted as an experimental feature that is not supported.

It's quite important & vital as when such experimental argument disables 'all-focus', it allows for seamless interaction with any other applications that wish to capture gamepad input. It's important that users should be able to use other applications with their gamepad simultaneously, like kodi, without worrying about IR remotes- or other ways to speak to kodi.

[ghost]

I've also noticed when using -steamdeck, that multiple running apps can take the gamepads input at the same time.

I had to resort to using keyboard mappings for specific apps and this somehow works.

Though it's a great idea to focus all apps- I'd much rather disable this 'all-focus' behavior with a flag. At least, in the meantime until steam develops extended controller support to fix this; focusing all apps is a hacky solution IMO

so far, great experience! I am able to embed my games in a single window on my tiling wayland compositor! Thank you 👍.

[luni3359]

This affects all games that have automatic pause features when unfocused.

[patlefort]

I would also really like an option to disable the feature. It affects some games where they will intentionally throttle to save power and also cut off sound while unfocused. It is really useful if you say, want to watch a video while the game is in the background. Especially in MMOs where I tend to stay afk waiting for stuff to happen.