Re: Quorum Studio 2.0 - Accessible Scene Editing
Re: Quorum Studio 2.0 - Accessible Scene Editing Singing Butterfly,Hmm, the java virtual machine is bundled with quorum studio, so you shouldn't have to do anything special to have it load. Can you post the exact command you are issuing and the error message you are getting? URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/549748/#p549748 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Quorum Studio 2.0 - Accessible Scene Editing
Re: Quorum Studio 2.0 - Accessible Scene Editing Folks,I'm excited at the interest and will try to answer more questions:1. Beta flagI'm super tickled people tried to hack at the JSON to get access, but that feature only works if you've been sent the special beta download. It's also available for any version post 2.0, but I didn't back-port it to 1.1 because it was a complete rewrite of the auto-update system. The beta was made available to people on the quorum mailing list if they asked for it, but has now ended given the release is in just a few days. Folks can feel free to join that here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/quorum-language2. Backend of audio systemWe use OpenAL in the backend and then wrote our own Digital signal processing engine around it. 3. For the question about the Audio3D objectsI'm not totally sure I follow the questions here, but I "think" what you're asking is how you update the properties. The point is that you can either "hook" these objects and move them around the scene, letting the system automatically adjust properties. Or, alternatively, you can set the audio systems properties as you see fit. Or, if you want to go nuts, you can grab the raw audio buffers and tell it to do whatever you want. I hope that answers the right question, but feel free to ask something else. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/549369/#p549369 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Quorum Studio 2.0 - Accessible Scene Editing
Re: Quorum Studio 2.0 - Accessible Scene Editing @jack Exactly, that's why we didn't support it so far. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/548996/#p548996 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Quorum Studio 2.0 - Accessible Scene Editing
Re: Quorum Studio 2.0 - Accessible Scene Editing @Ironcross Are you using 32 bit Windows 10? We actually only support 64 because we've never had anyone request 32. If I recall correctly, the max memory limitation of 4 gigs moved most people away from it. I can ask the team, though, how hard it would be to get 32 bit support. Last time I looked at it, we just weren't bundling the 32 bit DLL, so it "might" not be so bad. I know we can't do it before release, as we're still doing quality assurance on all of the parts, knocking off bugs here and there when we find them, but if it helps you I can look. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/548918/#p548918 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Quorum Studio 2.0 - Accessible Scene Editing
Re: Quorum Studio 2.0 - Accessible Scene Editing I'm not sure. There's no relationship between Sodbeans and Quorum Studio. The sodbeans code was written in Java, while the new version is written in Quorum, so it's a complete rewrite. What operating system are you running? It does require Windows 10 64 bit. Also, weird on the birthday thing. I've never run into that when making accounts, although that isn't something I do very often. I just tried it and it didn't yell at me or anything. What did you type in that it didn't like for birthday? URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/548743/#p548743 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Quorum Studio 2.0 - Accessible Scene Editing
Re: Quorum Studio 2.0 - Accessible Scene Editing Ya I'm not sure how the ARM switch will impact us either. Lots of questions, for sure. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/548612/#p548612 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Quorum Studio 2.0 - Accessible Scene Editing
Re: Quorum Studio 2.0 - Accessible Scene Editing Hey folks,1. Link without logging in.I also recommend password managers. That's what I do myself. It's a free product, but to track unique users requiring a login is an annoyance, I admit, but helps us keep our reporting to our funders accurate.2. Mac version accessibleI sure hope so! We really want to do it, but don't have the cash at the moment. There's a way to do it in the architecture by implementing an accessibility manager on mac. The hard part is getting native layers on each platform. 3. GraphicsYes, that's the idea in the project. All of the graphics in Quorum are hardware accelerated, but also have accessibility hooks. They are graphical and also accessible. This includes the scene editor system. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/548591/#p548591 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Quorum Studio 2.0 - Accessible Scene Editing
Re: Quorum Studio 2.0 - Accessible Scene Editing Hey folks, Lots of great questions and I'll try to answer them all as best as I can:1. Drunk uncle:Drunk uncles are awesome. I have some stories ...2. Download link:Quorum Studio 2.0, with these features, comes out a week from today on Friday, so you can't get it quite yet. I think there are 3 more bugs we have to squash in the bug tracker. The beta has been going great so far, though. I'll post again when it's live.3. Cost:Yup, it's free. We are funded by the National Science Foundation and have worked hard to make something solid available to the community at no cost. For the login link, you have to login because we report anonymous unique users to the NSF, but that's all. There's no cost or anything. 4. Network supportYes, we have network support. Here's a tutorial:https://quorumlanguage.com/tutorials/ne … rview.htmlNormally, the way I use our network support is to bounce HTTP requests off of a server and do JSON parsing to coordinate. We do this on a different project to add blind accessibility for robotic telescopes (The IDATA project). We use it in games too though. The JSON parser is here: https://quorumlanguage.com/tutorials/data/overview.html They don't do everything I want, but they do a heck of a lot already.5. How limited is it?Quorum has a ton of stuff nowadays, but doesn't have everything I want. We don't expose custom shaders in the engine, although we're working on that. Our 3D animation pipeline is also not great. But, we have a nice physics system built in, an accessible user interface layer, tons and tons of graphics and audio features, and I can't think of another gaming architecture that has accessibility built in as a first class citizen. So for example, a 3D model can be given the focus and it goes straight down to the screen reader like anything else --- crucially --- only if you want it to. Even Quorum Studio itself is actually just a game where we've tricked OpenGL magically to be accessible. So, I have a wish list of stuff I want built for it, but it does a lot already.6. Do you have HRTF?Yes we have that. We also have a custom sound synthesis engine, which can be routed around however you want for custom UGens and stuff if that's your thing. We also have 3D spatialized audio, which works pretty well with complex sound setups and like you said makes it easy to map models to sounds and move them around in a 3D soundscape. Here's the tutorial sequence on how to do all that: https://quorumlanguage.com/tutorials/ds … intro.html7. AccessibilityThanks for the kind words on that! We've worked really hard to make it accessible. For the editor, we've made a number of improvements on the accessibility front this release. For example, you can bounce around between Git annotations for file diffing version controlled project on Github or Bitbucket. We've also improved code completion, made some small improvements to our smart navigation. I also added in a feature to give you summary information in components. So basically, you hit a key and it tries to give you good accessibility information about where you are and stuff like that. One of these is a summarizer in the source code and another is a "where am I" key basically. I don't know if people will like those features yet, but we're experimenting and giving some ideas a shot. My hope is it will give better "context" about where you are in the editor, but give it a shot when it comes out and feel free to provide feedback.Thanks for the kind words everyone. I'm super excited for this technology to finally come out and to show it off at EPIQ!Stefik URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/548522/#p548522 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Quorum Studio 2.0 - Accessible Scene Editing
Re: Quorum Studio 2.0 - Accessible Scene Editing As one other item, we have also posted a walk-through for making a simple RPG game in the new system, which we will be presenting at our annual conference, EPIQ, which is online and available to all:https://www.eventbrite.com/e/experience … 6581645031If you would like to follow along on your own or join us, we have posted all of the materials publicly for the venue this year:https://quorumlanguage.com/lessons/epiq.htmlWe will be putting out captioned videos after the conference with sessions from the venue. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/548429/#p548429 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Quorum Studio 2.0 - Accessible Scene Editing
Quorum Studio 2.0 - Accessible Scene Editing Folks,I know there some folks out there interested in our accessible game creation utilities. I thought I would post on here that the next version of our tools comes out in about a week. In the new version, there is a 2D game creator, with similarities to Tiled or other similar tools, but accessible. Here are the release notes:https://quorumlanguage.com/release.htmlI know some folks have asked us what you can do in the new editor. While our tool doesn't come out until the 10th (unless you are in the beta), we've put up a tutorial on what it can do here:https://quorumlanguage.com/tutorials/Scenes/intro.htmlHappy hacking! URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/548428/#p548428 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Survey of cross-platform spatial audio libraries
Re: Survey of cross-platform spatial audio libraries @11Technically, Quorum is just running an OpenAL stack under the hood. So ya, you could do whatever stuff you wanted in C if you felt like it. The API on top of it is then basically designed to give easy access to easy things, like doing spatial audio without low level buffer manipulation, while still giving you access to anything low level you want to tackle. Or at least, I think so at least. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/487818/#p487818 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Introducing Quorum Programming Language!
Re: Introducing Quorum Programming Language! Ok great, thanks all. Some responses:1. We've fixed the say bug internally. I posted about the fix on the mailing list, but that will go live in the first patch.2. Slowness for loading projects. Ok, sounds great. I'll add in those status messages then. I'll experiment around with it and see what "feels" right for it. Thanks for the feedback! URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/487817/#p487817 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Survey of cross-platform spatial audio libraries
Re: Survey of cross-platform spatial audio libraries You could try Quorum's 3D positional audio libraries or DSP engine if you want:https://quorumlanguage.com/tutorials/ds … orial.htmlIt's been pretty well vetted and I find it a lot easier to use than something like fmod, while still giving a significant amount of power for doing 3D positional audio through HRTF or otherwise. Basically, you can make objects, attach sound to them, and then move them in 3Space and the engine does the rest. Or, if you want to go nuts and do the multi-channel stuff yourself, you have access at the really low level if that's your thing as well. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/487345/#p487345 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Introducing Quorum Programming Language!
Re: Introducing Quorum Programming Language! @36 1. Could you give us more information on slowness? I'm happy to toss it in a profiler and take a gander at whatever you are experiencing. Notably, if you can tell us which component is being slow and what keys you are pressing when that happens, it helps a lot. NVDA sends back hundreds of messages on each keypress, so knowing that level of detail could help track down what you are experiencing.2. For loading a project, this one is in the bug tracker already and I've figured out a fix, but haven't posted it in a patch yet. If I recall correctly, there's a few other feature requests related to status reports in NVDA (e.g., compiles finished, errors reported) and I figure somebody on the team will do them all at once after the holidays. You're right though, I think if Quorum Studio is more explicit about telling you when that's finished, it would be better. If there are other messages you want the environment to send you as you are programming, feel free to request them. They are relatively easy to add in Quorum's accessibility libraries. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/487314/#p487314 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Introducing Quorum Programming Language!
Re: Introducing Quorum Programming Language! No problem. I think you could probably do it in most LL(k) grammars, off the top of my head, but adaptive LL * creates a parse forest, very efficiently. It's a neat little algorithm. That's the standard in Antlr nowadays and to my knowledge is the fastest of the current parse forest algorithms. It gives us a lot of flexibility at the parsing level and we definitely take advantage of it. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/486918/#p486918 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Introducing Quorum Programming Language!
Re: Introducing Quorum Programming Language! Ethin,A few quick things:1. Modern context free grammar notations can definitely handle using = for both positions. This is easy in modern algorithms like Adaptive LL* and doesn't require anything special. If you want to confirm, I can send you the grammar. It's open source and all. It's pretty easy.2. I know it's counter intuitive that it's easier to understand/use = with both, but the studies are pretty clear on this point. Number #25 on this page gives methodological details if you want: http://web.cs.unlv.edu/stefika/publications.html. I didn't believe it either until the studies came back. In fact, earlier versions of Quorum used a variety of alternative syntax choices until we based them on data. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/486897/#p486897 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Introducing Quorum Programming Language!
Re: Introducing Quorum Programming Language! Ethin,First, you aren't the only one with the opinion on traditional for/while. There's a few facts to be aware of with it:1. Studies on blocks and syntax in text based languages show basically a tripling effect with novice performance. Basically, students can write correct programs faster, along with other properties (e.g., understanding it better). I'm simplifying from the results, which are a little complicated to understand, but that's the idea. Seems to be the same result regardless of language.2. It's actually pretty normal to believe the other is superior. In fact, it's such a commonplace belief that one of the studies we did years ago studied people's perceptions of it. Notably, turns out that for every year of experience people claim to have (self-reported), they garner a large and statistically significant increase in how much they perceive that syntax to be intuitive. AKA --- there's a standard equation for a bias effect.So basically, people that learned such syntax tend to think it's fine, but careful measurements of human behavior show that it should not be immune to criticism because it has undesirable properties like being hard to learn and error prone (e.g., Neil Brown's data). We actually see this all the time in studies. We did a recent study on database programming and, similarly, devs often believe they are doing well, or not, but performance doesn't necessarily match their beliefs. That's why we use data on Quorum. We don't want to just "choose" the syntax, we want something external to our beliefs and value systems we can use as checks and balances during the design process.Second, Adoption:Short answer is I don't know why people adopt/don't quorum. It's clearly being adopted, but I have no evidence on the reasons. We do follow evidence from Meyerovich and Rabkin on adoption rates, which are related to what we choose to add on to the standard library in Quorum. That probably has an impact, but how much is unclear. Schools probably have their own reasons, but again I don't track these things. I'm just an open source dev and prof that cares about these things and tries to make quorum better. Schools do seem to like it, which is great, but who knows.Natural Language:You're totally right on natural language. In fact, the evidence is often tricky. Language that is natural in English often does poorly in studies. The word repeat does well, which may sound natural depending on what you mean, but individual token choices are based on statistical analysis because it's just not intuitive what works and what doesn't without it. For example, Quorum has no left bracket, but does have a right and the paren's are missing. Or, the comparison operator in ifs is the =, which is 8x less likely to have errors compared to =, even in the presence of assignment operators. Pretty weird how the data comes out, or at least it was before the data came out. In any case, what natural even means is not clear, but you're right that just assuming English, like if then, is the answer is definitely not supported by the evidence. Anyway, hope that helps. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/486606/#p486606 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Introducing Quorum Programming Language!
Re: Introducing Quorum Programming Language! Hey everyone,This is Andreas Stefik. My wife and I invented Quorum about 10 years ago and Brandon asked me to come post in here. I have to say that I'm really enjoying the conversation, even the parts where people have suggestions for improvement, as listening and thinking things through like everyone is doing is exactly how things get better over time. I've read everyone's posts and have tried to condense things down.1. Claim: Quorum is small and is not used much.This was true 10 years ago. We started with maybe 5 or so children using it as a test and never intended for it to be adopted anywhere, schools for the blind or not. It was just an experiment and I was messing around after graduate school However, and to be honest I'm still shocked by this, Quorum's adoption has grown exponentially, with now ballpark 15k users online every month. Many schools use it in the blind community, true, and while nothing is perfect we work damn hard to make things accessible, but a very substantial number of schools use it outside the blind community as well. People use it in other countries and a number of conferences are held using it every year. The honest truth is that I don't organize any of this myself. It just happened organically. I just enjoy building and hacking on the language. I also enjoy conducted research experiments trying to refute pieces of the language so I can improve it over time.2. Claim: Quorum has limited audio capabilities and lacks 3DQuorum has had 3D audio support for a long-time and today even has a full digital signal processing engine where you can adjust the sound to your heart's content in multiple channels. There is a 10-tutorial sequence on how to use much of this functionality here:https://quorumlanguage.com/tutorials/ds … intro.htmlNothing is perfect and feature requests are welcome, but it is quite powerful even today.3. Claim: The old IDE, Sodbeans, was clunky.The old IDE, Sodbeans, was insanely clunky and all of us hated it. The problems people mention in this thread are 100% true and frustrated us for years. The problem was, fixing it and getting an IDE created that met the accessibility guidelines we wanted took us several years and a lot of cash from the National Science Foundation. Because of that work, Quorum now has a user interface library that calls down to low-level accessibility APIs on the system. The reason for that is because, if instead of using a normal UI toolkit, you use Quorums, this allows us to sync a hardware accelerated graphics library to sound.Now, think about that for a second. This technology allows you to make some pretty seriously neat things from an audio games perspective, or just in general. For example, you can create "items" in a game, attach sounds to them, and move them around. You can apply physics or other properties to them and the games will respond automatically. Further, in interviews with blind students in the classroom, one of the most common requests we heard years ago was that students wanted to make games that had audio components, but that students consistently asked us not to make them audio only, so that students with sighted friends, or who had partial sight, could also participate. The purpose is that Quorum Studio is getting a 3D level editor, fully accessible, and we're starting pilot testing of that next semester. The idea is to see if we can't make something as visually compelling and complex as Unity3D accessible and I think we're going to be able to do it with this architecture. We'd love to have people from this community participate in the testing process and provide constructive criticism.4. The new IDE is Quorum StudioListening to this thread, it sounds like people want a better way to find syntax errors. You got it. I've looked up the UIA properties and will try to figure this out for a patch. I was actually hoping to have this in before the 1.0 release, but couldn't squeeze it into the dev schedule. The current thinking is to use a UIA spelling error property for syntax errors and grammar error for editor hints, but we will have to evaluate that in user testing I think.For Mac support, we would really love to get NSAccessible Support in there for voice over. Problem is though, it's damned expensive to do it. We looked into the dev time to do it and we just don't have the resources. We would love to have Quorum Studio have screen reader support everywhere, but short and skinny we don't have the cash to hire enough developers without cutting crucial features we told the National Science Foundation we would do.5. Quorum's syntax choicesOne of the weird things about Quorum is that people often don't realize that the dev team only sort of makes decisions about syntax here. In fact, what we do is run randomized controlled trials, with human users, comparing syntactic alternatives in studies on human productivity. It's a complex topic and I personally enjoy basing these
