You are not logged in.
I am trying to accomplish the following:
I have one very powerful computer more than capable of running multiple instances of high end games. I want to be able to have one person using the computer in the normal sense, with keyboard / game controller connected to it and running games. And a second person able to stream games simultaneously from the steam in house streaming functionality. I am very close to accomplishing this in the following way:
I have one user logged in, and signed into steam account running games normally
I have a second user logged in with tigervnc server started like:
systemctl start vncserver@:3.service
and I have configured lightdm to accept VNC connections.
then i connect from another laptop using 'vncviewer' and ssh tunneling to the vnc server hosted on the powerful machine and I start steam, install the games etc.
Then I am able use the steam streaming client to connect to the powerful machine running the games.
This works nearly perfectly, with one caveat which has driven me nuts. keyboard and mouse work fine, but gamepad controls from the client (cheap computer) do not work. normally once you press one gamepad button, the in game menu will change to show the A button, B button etc, but none of the inputs are registering or doing anything. However, in the steam input controller config, I can bind my gamepad controls to keyboard keys, like left thumb stick up = w, left thumbstick down = s etc, and this works, but it is really annoying. And the steam big picture menu on the host machine accepts the input from my controller, but when i exit out of the big picture mode, the game does not respond to the controller unless i remap those buttons to keyboard keys.
So it seems as if within the virtual X session created by VNC server, there is no way to simulate an input from a gamepad in such a way that the game will think there is a gamepad. I've tried simulating gamepad with a .c program which writes to /dev/uinput. when i run that program on my local computer (cheap laptop), I can get it to control the games as a gamepad. If I run that same program within the VNC server on the powerful gaming machine, it does not work. So my best guess is there is something about that VNC virtual environment that is blocking a gamepad input which is recognizable by the games.
I've tried many other approaches to this (steam headless, x0vncserver) , and what i described is the closest I've gotten to what I want. I've had the two games running at once perfectly, one on the physical computer screen, and one through the steam streaming, but I just can't get this stupid gamepad controller input to work.
Last edited by zonzon510 (2024-11-12 01:37:38)
Offline
I stopped the line when I read "vnc"
tldr: you won't be able to accomplish this with vnc but require VMs and maybe multiple GPUs
have a look at LinusTechTips video series about "one computer with X users":
https://youtu.be/LuJYMCbIbPk
https://youtu.be/1yFQd4MaKK0
https://youtu.be/Bc3LGVi5Sio
another option could be a terminal server like used by NetworkChuck: https://youtu.be/qdo5lMR1lX4
Last edited by cryptearth (2024-11-12 06:48:05)
Offline