Re: FPS Engine Preview/request for feedback
Libaudioverse compiles with VC++ 2015 (but not earlier) via Cmake. Microsoft has been adding a great number of features to C++ that I need to make things be sane, so earlier versions aren't possible. As usual, Microsoft is behind every other platform in implementing the latest standards, so we only have complete support for C++11 as of 2015. I do not plan to support MinGW; MinGW is regularly missing pieces of the windows API.
And now I'm about to rant. This advice is probably not helpful to new programmers:
I do not use an IDE. If you are blind, they are mostly a waste of time. In C++, they mostly tie you to one platform as well. Unfortunately, in the case of the Microsoft languages, you don't really have a choice anymore. I don't use Jaws for the simple reason that it is overpriced and NVDA definitively works; it will also probably be mostly dead in 5 years. I'm surprised to hear it still wor
ks, the last version Jaws "officially" supported was 2010, and I had all sorts of really strange issues even then. There's a chance that Microsoft might eventually support the accessibility APIs in future, but huge portions of VS2015 aren't exposed via the accessibility APIs properly. The biggest debacle in 2015 is that you will always get line numbers read even if you turn them off, though MS claims to have fixed this in an upcoming update. Too bad all of the debugger is still completely inaccessible with anything but Jaws, though, and maybe not even there. MS has known about the debugger problems for at least 3 years; when I reported it a while back I was told they knew but didn't have the time, but thanks for bothering to say something.
This is why I don't suggest C# to blind people. If you choose one of the .net languages, half of the tools are only available through the Visual Studio IDE and, as of the latest vers
ion, it looks like this trend is continuing. This effectively ties your happiness as a programmer to the whims of Microsoft and whether or not the current regime cares about accessibility; at the moment, they don't seem to but the rumor mill says this may be changing.
The real problem with IDEs in general, though: for the most part an IDE is about efficiently displaying information to someone who can glance at 10 things in a tenth of a second. I'd probably opt into VS for some stuff if it became accessible as C# has a lot of good support for accessible GUIs, but for the most part the workflow as a blind person remains the same as if you just didn't bother. I've never seen a completely working implementation of autocomplete on any platform, we don't get the formatting info, and we can't look at 6 panels at the same time with ease.
My IDE advice is don't and use one of the following languages: Python, Ruby, Go, Rust, _javascript_, C++, Java, Scala. You can program in all of these using only the command line, most of the IDEs will still let you collaborate with people using them without too much effort, they're all quite capable languages, more than one of those is general purpose, and most of them will get you a well-paying job. There are still more with good command line tooling. But tieing yourself to an IDE as a blind person is like pointing a loaded gun at your head: it explicitly puts your future as a programmer in the hands of two separate organizations (the SR devs and the maker of the IDE), neither of which care about programmers and one of which usually doesn't care about accessibility. So enjoy waking up tomorrow to find out that the new version isn't accessible and that you're probably out of a job in 6 months when your employer upgrades or that your current projects are effectively dead because the current version of the language won't suppor
t or run on new OSes. If there were more blind programmers in general and more blind programmers that cared specifically, we could probably do something. But at the moment we're in such a tiny minority even compared to blind people that we basically have no power to change it.
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