Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nullabillity | Hacker News Reader

> especially if you take into consideration Steam's Big Picture mode and that it needs to be usable with a controller (though perhaps the Steam Controller can also function as a regular desktop mouse, assuming it doesn't rely on Steam itself to move the cursor around - which may not work when the UAC prompt is shown - and on the other hand some older games do need to run as Administrator and/or a compatibility mode that shows a UAC prompt, so perhaps SC can work with that).

The Steam Controller has a "lizard mode" for when it can't connect to Steam where it just acts as a dumb mouse. I have no idea whether it enables that for UAC prompts, but it probably could.

View on HN

I just checked, and yes, you can use Steam Controller to get through UAC prompts. The joystick mimics the arrow keys, the right trackpad moves the mouse cursor, the trigger buttons represent mouse clicks, and A is Enter.

How does Steam capture the secure desktop that displays the UAC prompt?

It doesn't. The controller simply acts as a mouse/minimal keyboard outside Steam.

So if you're using Steam streaming and the session switches to the secure desktop due to a UAC prompt, what happens... does the screen just go blank (a la VNC), leaving the remote user locked out?

Just tried. If you're already streaming, it manages to show you the prompt, but there's no way to interact with it. The mouse moves (both on the host and client), but clicks don't go through. Keyboard navigation doesn't work either.

If you try to stream something that first pops up UAC, the client just sits there waiting for it to be dealt with on the host.

Steam streaming always manages to feel half baked to me for reasons like this. Another is that it needs to unlock your screen before it can be used. So you either leave your computer unlocked, or you need to VNC into it to unlock the screen so Steam streaming works.

Every time I do that I think there must be a better way.

Yeah, i often control my machine via RDP and then streaming a game from there is a pain. Here is some script I've found to unlock the local pc, disconnecting RDP in the process:

> @powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "$sessionid=((quser $env:USERNAME | select -Skip 1) -split '\s+')[2]; tscon $sessionid /dest:console" 2> UnlockErrors.logpp

I've not used it often and mostly given up on Steams streaming stuff. Playing simple stuff though RDP directly usually works well enough for the few times I still did that. Notably pretty much all games launch flawlessly. The drawback is it not being optimized for games, offering a notably worse performance on that front.

It actually gets even more confusing. Desktop mode (what you get when Steam is in desktop mode or you're tabbed out of big picture/TV mode) is completely separate from lizard mode (what you get when Steam isn't running or can't grab the desktop due to UAC/Secure Desktop).

That matters because desktop mode still has customizable keybindings as usual, while lizard mode is completely hard-coded. Lizard mode also (obviously) doesn't support the soft keyboard, which would otherwise have been pretty useful from the lock/login screen.

Come on folks, don't downvote a question you don't understand

Reply on news.ycombinator.com