DroidDeck/docs/releases/0.1.5.md

# SteamDeck 0.1.5

**A new front end, settings that open where they are, the client's frames back on a flagship, a
new icon and three themes in its colours, and the first pull requests from a second pair of
hands.** Install it over 0.1.4; same key, same runtime, nothing to re-download.

---

##  The front end

The main screen is a rail and a pane. The rail lists what can be launched - **Steam** and its
installed games, **Desktop** and its emulators and *their* games - and **Setup** under them, every
category folded when the app opens so the rail is three headers and their counts. The pane shows
the chosen thing with its launch button, its art, and a shelf of the rest. A session left in the
background is the first thing on the rail, with a pulse, and tapping it goes back in.

It moves: the selection is one pill that glides between rows, lists unfold with their children
staggering in, a page change cascades the new page in row by row over a blurred wash of its own
art, tiles lift and shine under the pad, the launch button sweeps a sheen and squashes on press,
and the session rises over the front end and sinks back. Every duration follows the system's
animator scale, so "no animations" in developer options snaps all of it.  Seen on a Pocket FIT
and a Fold.

**Emulators launch from the rail, under gamescope, with their games.** The ROMs folder is scanned
per system (one level of subfolders, PS3 game folders, RPCS3's own installed games by their
PARAM.SFO with their icons), and each game launches straight in.  God of War II HD booted in RPCS3
from the rail, ~40 fps on the FIT - the first emulator game from the app. The desktop's own Steam
launchers hand a game to the app's Steam session ( the hand-off itself is not yet proven).

##  Settings without a pop-up

The cog's window and the Performance dialog are pages in the pane: one row per setting, its value
in a chip, and a small faded menu that opens right under the chip. One menu at a time; the page
dims while it is open; the back key, the rail and the page's own Back all leave it. **Steam** and
**Desktop** each have a Settings entry in the rail that lights while its page shows. Frame
generation, Session logs, Start offline and Theme open their menu right on their rail row.

The **session drawer** is the same rows and menus, sliding in from the right: Now (HUD, frame
generation, touch, the virtual pad, keyboard, the client's menu) and Next session (display shape,
FEX preset, compatibility tools), with Send to background and Stop at the end.

##  The icon, and themes in its colours

A new launcher icon (Kurt's), and the same mark in the rail and on the loading screen. Three
themes under Setup › Theme, in the icon's black, white and blue: **Paper on black** (the default -
white is the primary, the blue is the small signal for rules, rings and dots), **Icon blue**, and
**Electric navy**. A change applies at once.

##  Run as a game, and the client's frames back

- The app is declared a **game** to Android, with a game-mode config that welcomes Performance
  mode and refuses the OS-side frame-rate cap and resolution downscaling - the interventions that
  make a regular flagship's Big Picture crawl while a gaming phone's does not. The session window
  asks for **sustained performance mode**, the panel's **fastest display mode** at its size, tells
  GameManager it is in gameplay, and opens an **ADPF hint session** over the compositor thread fed
  with each presented frame's interval. One `perf:` line in the session log says what took.
- **The client's GPU process stops dying on its way up.** libpci picks its procfs backend because
  the app can read `/proc/bus/pci`, then dies on the devices file inside it, which Android denies;
  Chromium loads libpci in its GPU process, so after a few tries CEF drew the whole interface on
  the CPU. An empty file bound over that path at session start answers the scan truthfully.
  (WinNative, maxjivi05: 44 → 85 fps in the Big Picture library on a OnePlus 15.)  Big Picture at
  117–118 fps on both panels of a 120 Hz Fold, Adreno 830.
- **Client interface** switches on the Performance page: threaded GL, lazy descriptors and no GL
  error checks, all on by default; **Steam Deck mode** (`-steamdeck -steamos3`) off by default,
  since the client then expects Deck hardware. What is in effect is in the device report.
- **720p by default** for the client and the desktop; a cap you chose still wins.
- **FEXCore presets** for the x86 games the client launches, Bannerlator's table carried over:
  Stability, Compatibility, Intermediate, Performance, Performance + TSO, Extreme, Extreme + TSO,
  Extreme-gn, Denuvo. The default is FEX's own defaults, which is what every session ran on before.
- The guest gets the device's **time zone** (the client's clock and logs were UTC).
- A device without an Adreno GPU is told **before** the runtime download that a session would be
  sound over a black screen.
- The app's own libraries are **16 KB-aligned** (Android 15 devices).  Six prebuilt PulseAudio
  libraries are still 4 KB-only and need a rebuild.

##  On-screen controls: sticks, and the bars

A **left and a right stick** beside the d-pad, a base and a knob that follows the finger, writing
the pad's thumb axes the way a physical stick does. The controls **take the bars** beside or under
the picture when the panel letterboxes it - a Fold's side bars, a square panel's bottom band -
and only overlay the picture when there are none wide enough.  Not yet tried in a game.

##  From Kurt (xXJSONDeruloXx)

- The **hardware Back button** reaches the app and opens the drawer instead of going into Steam
  as Select.  Verified on an AYN Thor.
- The **launcher icon**.
- **Local build and deploy helpers**: a Docker build for the preload libraries, a local release
  build with signing, an ADB install helper.

Every pull request against main now builds by itself and gets one comment kept current: mergeable
or the conflicting hunks, and a failed build's compiler errors. The README lists the contributors
and a ledger of their pull requests that a workflow keeps.

##  Smaller

The file manager and the picker stay in landscape · a session's log folder goes with it when it
ends and the next session gets its own · a replaced session's exit no longer ends the one that
replaced it · the desktop page says "Linux desktop environment" · the Kotlin compiler's session
files are ignored.

---

##  Carried over - still open

The desktop → Steam hand-off and the sticks are untested on a device. A stick click is not yet
offered. VAC-protected games report insecure. Games that ship only a Linux build won't start.

## Credits

- **maxjivi05 (Max)** - the gamescope runtime this is built on, the sandbox shims, the controller
  work, the NetworkManager stand-in and the libpci fix, from WinNative.
- **Kurt Himebauch (xXJSONDeruloXx)** - the launcher icon, the hardware Back fix, the local build
  helpers.
- **The412Banner** - the app, the Wayland compositor, the runtime plumbing, the Steam session, the
  front end and the File Manager (from Bannerlator).
- **Winlator (brunodev85)** - the audio stack, the gamepad model and the shape of a session.
- **Vauzi (Vauzi-17/710)** - the Adreno 710/720/722 device entries the experimental driver carries.

Frame generation: **Win-FG** is built in; **LSFG** uses the shader chain from *your own copy* of
Lossless Scaling, read on device and never redistributed, on groundwork from **lsfg-vk (PancakeTAS)**.

GPL-3.0. gamescope, Mesa, Turnip, Xwayland, labwc, LXQt, PulseAudio, proot and Arch Linux ARM are
their own authors'. **Not affiliated with Valve** - Steam, Proton and Steam Deck are Valve's, and no
Valve software is redistributed here: the client is fetched from Valve's own manifest on your device.

---

**APK** `SteamDeck-0.1.5.apk` - 21093959 bytes
`sha256 85b4295431ddea6f35025959864f3fbb47ad238693e146405ac0fe6ae87504f1`
versionCode 6, built from `d2f4a84` by [run 35813465422](https://github.com/The412Banner/SteamDeck/actions/runs/35813465422).
Signed with the AOSP test key (v1 + v2 + v3), so it installs over 0.1.4 in place.