Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib hello @daigoniteWell one thing that is clear of this project, is that is ambitious; really ambitious and if it can really go out could have a lot of interesting stuff, but... so, a few questions.The idea is, if you want to implement max in a game; do you must be aware of that in the early stages of the project? or the final goal is that you can connect max with any kind of game in any stage of your project, with any framework and you can be happy.Other things. If you use max for add some components to your game, like... I don't know 3d sounded navigation, screen reader support, and accessible HUD notifications... can you close the source of your game, and not allow more max modules connect to it?For example if you are trying to create a simple, but closed gameplay and don't want to any other third plugin connects to your game an modify your gameplay?Or. If you build some parts of your game without using max module... How max module that you connect to your game can understand that other parts that aren't modules? You have follow a standard to max plugins can understand these parts or really is matter of each plugin create an understandable communication system.And... when you want to have a comersial game. closed sourced, for your company, and use other giant tools like unity and only use max to add these things that unity can't give to you how works that? Is related with the previous question; is convinable the use of these open tools, with a closed project?Is really a big project, but... Some things i cant really figure how can finally be.Only the time will talking about... but well...A, what is the problem of software that ask for royalties for use comercially their engines? the opensource world is a beafutyful utopi, but these companies need money to pay to their developers... but well. linux people. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/539332/#p539332 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib Hi.I didn't know it would be free, but rereading this thread, I think you mentioned open source so that's good.I kind of get what you're doing now and am glad you've seamed to have calmed down since last year or whenever that web thing was made.Honestly that kind of annoys me a bit when devs try a screen reader, or app, then think I can't do thing x so obviously it can't be done by others. It can, it's just these people haven't been using the tools as long as we have I hope this tool works out for you and that we get to see some games using it in the future.Oh, BTW, sable already exists for RPGs for blind people, I'm just letting you know so that you know what's out there. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/537150/#p537150 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib @18You say it makes things easier by adding different UIS, I think, but if a sighted dev is going to make their game accessible, they'd do that anyway wouldn't they?The problem is that making a game blind accessible as a sighted developer currently has these problems:1. The developer is sighted and tells blind players how to play. There are already multiple modes that blind people may prefer to use, and they are forced to use a suboptimal one created by what a sighted player thinks is better. 2. The developer has to actually, well, develop the accessibility instead of end users referencing some documentation that describes how the objects are mapped out and building out the accessibility themselves from a fork of one of the currently existing accessibility modules. Even if the docs don't exist the actual work of getting a custom module working for a game developed with max would be relatively trivial to start and can be smoothed out over time by a community since its a messaging based system.Also, if a developer is developing their own accessible UI, this is only part of a larger single game UI that they have constructed. It still can't be changed or reinterpreted.To me it sounds like you're trying to make a tool that doesn't need to exist because if sighted devs want to add accessibility they'll do it and if they won't then they won't. You can't force them to make their games accessible you no.Most devs would be more willing to make their games accessible outside of specific circumstances (mostly competitive gaming or very pretentious developers) but the problem is that the information, tools and technical requirements are way too much to expect from a privately sourced piece of code. Max basically takes the UI components of a game and abstracts them and can be connected with other engines/languages. So, they don't actually have to do the work since Max rearranges the UIs based on the end user's preferences instead.So you have a way of adding bleeps and sonar and things to a sighted game?Absolutely. So basically, it would create an environment that your UI interacts with, and part of that absolutely could be producing sonar and bleeps. Especially if it creates a geometric space where you can calculate proximity to walls and stuff. A generalist application would probably have some limitations, but because I want to make several open source accessibility modules, these can be used as starters; and the community can produce their own. Actually I highly recommend once we get a few starter modules working and walk people through it to encourage development of blind starter modules built by blind people to avoid the whole "blind peopel playing sighted UIs" shit. From there, we can customize modules to be custom fit for each game, essentially producing accessibility mods for Max-compatible games.The way this interacts with the industry is that Max's accessibility and UI power is incredibly high, and because it's open source and not owned by a private company (and i'm going to try to keep it as much of a community project as possible), it's essentially a powerful piece of open source code that can be used on a ton of platforms. To encourage its use I'm also going to be producing game builders, an RPG engine clone for example. A bonus of these engines is since they are more standardized than general game development, games built in them have a high level of predictability in their UIs making accessibility much easier to develop for.It's not something that's going to be integrated into every game. The idea is to encourage it to spread as far as it possibly can, by targeting developers and bypassing corporations, which developers don't want to deal with anyways (seriously nobody wants to fucking deal with royalties ok lol). Devs dont want to give these companies their money if they don't have to, offering a free alternative that integrates with commercial solutions is a powerful alternative.Also worth pointing out is that Max would also have a high level of moddability in its games, which would be another attraction to using the system.It honestly still sounds to me like you're doing something that a sighted dev could do if they cared.Stop moralizing the developer's actions. Games are complicated pieces of software and game developers are among the most abused in the software industry because of the tight deadlines. A lot of independent contractors use this tactic to make money off of this shit and still can't do their jobs right.How are you going to market this to x amount of devs when the small ones probably don't know or care about accessibility and the big ones already have accessibility implemented and if they don't chances are they won't care?A lot of game developers really do want to build accessible games but don't have the necessary resources to do so. Accessibility is an extremely niche knowledge pool and thus is usually relegated to expensive
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib Personally, I say go for it. I only sort of vaguely understand your end goal, and it seems way too abstract for my taste. But it's a moonshot, and I'm interested to see what results from it. Besides, games should be fun to both play *and* create. Even if I think your scope is ambitious, if you're having fun pursuing it and aren't doing any harm, well, what's the harm to me? URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/536813/#p536813 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib I don't understand half the stuff on here, so I just wanted to say, @1, I think what you're doing sounds really interesting. Best of luck to you, and I can't wait to see what you come up with! URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/536793/#p536793 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib Hi./edit/I reread over your post and still can't see the reason why someone would want to use this.You say it makes things easier by adding different UIS, I think, but if a sighted dev is going to make their game accessible, they'd do that anyway wouldn't they?To me it sounds like you're trying to make a tool that doesn't need to exist because if sighted devs want to add accessibility they'll do it and if they won't then they won't. You can't force them to make their games accessible you no./edit/So you have a way of adding bleeps and sonar and things to a sighted game?It honestly still sounds to me like you're doing something that a sighted dev could do if they cared.How are you going to market this to x amount of devs when the small ones probably don't know or care about accessibility and the big ones already have accessibility implemented and if they don't chances are they won't care?Also, do you have screen reader support with this project? The last time I checked your games were running sapi and while that might be ok for some sighted people, screen reader users will want to use their own screen reader.If this takes off, that will be great for you, I just don't think it will from a blindness point of view. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/536764/#p536764 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib Hi.So you have a way of adding bleeps and sonar and things to a sighted game?It honestly still sounds to me like you're doing something that a sighted dev could do if they cared.How are you going to market this to x amount of devs when the small ones probably don't know or care about accessibility and the big ones already have accessibility implemented and if they don't chances are they won't care?Also, do you have screen reader support with this project? The last time I checked your games were running sapi and while that might be ok for some sighted people, screen reader users will want to use their own screen reader. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/536764/#p536764 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib High contrast, subtitles, etc etc etc. are solved problems and games already do them. keyboard navigation is a solved problem because any game that wants to support a gamepad needs it. Anyone who wants to make a little in-game screen reader can with little to no effort by just making things speak when they get focus, and we can't make a multi-framework option because 99% of the time the UI is private to the game anyway. The rest of accessibility is specific to the gameplay. But in general, everything but blindness is already solved and you can just get Unity plugins for it if it's not built in by default.Have you actually built a game before or are you just saying this stuff? A lot of people forget just because its not part of the dev cycle. There is a real material element to bringing a game to production and a lot of that is what leads to basic "simple" accessibility fixes being lost in the wayside. This is again another reason why you can't rely on developers distributing UIs. Like look, just because ian hamilton gets paid to guilt trip developers into remembering this shit doesn't mean it actually works as an effective means of accessibility.Can you explain in a basic way for those of us who don't get this what exactly it's going to do? From my understanding, a dev can take your tool and make their up coming game accessible, is that right? But if that's so, why use your tool when they could build there own speaking menus etc?I think an analogy for people with no real technical understanding would be like this. Take me (sighted) and you (blind). The game is outside, where there are physically things that are happening that we interpret, I have a sighted interpretation and you have a blind interpretation. Outside is still consistent but we're organizing that stuff differently because your eyes dont work and mine do. We both have unique subjective ways of understanding the same world, and because of this, we interact with it in unique ways too.In a game, you have environments or UIs that have information literally in memory chilling out. What Max does is it makes it really easy to rearrange how that information is accessed, via a UI, and also changes how you interact with it - a lot of people think that a UI is just how you navigate/interpret these environments but it's also how you physically interface back to the game itself. So then you develop this back and forth response similar to the back and forth response you have when using your senses to navigate the real world. And just like how I'm sighted and you're blind, two different UI modules will cause a game to react differently because it's reading the movements slightly differently.Building anything in a game can take a lot of time; which is part of the reason why accessibility is neglected in the first place. Expecting devs to take care of this is inefficient, and as I stated previously there are a lot of problems with a privately owned boxed solution like an accessible Unity/UE4.Actually now I think on it, why would a blind dev want to use your tool? Surely if they were making an audiogame they'd already have the skillset to make that game and wouldn't need your app? I'm quite confused.This is actually a really good question that I think I should talk about more. First, most of the same reasons that a sighted dev would want to use Max (open source core, moddability, multiple language implementations, cross compatibility). But also, because Max is designed to be agnostic with how it manages its resources, audio game developers can build a game that sighted people can later mod and add graphics to or change the topology to, making audio games more accessible to the general public; while still containing the core original UI. It also allows both audio game devs and sighted devs to focus more on producing a preferred UI because it can simply be changed out for a different one.Also, Max enables accessibility for other disabilities as well. If you were to make a game with Max, you could feasibly make a blind-sighted-deaf pipeline without enforcing a UI.the problem with your agnosticism comparison between operating systems and actual games/game engines is that an operating system provides critical services and functionality required for a game -- or any executable binary, for that matter, in some executable format like ELF or PE -- to be executed and to function properly. It does this through abstractions like system calls and other mechanisms to abstract away the underlying physical machine from the programs that actually run on it. A program does not need to be aware of, for example, how a pixel is drawn onto the screen because the GPU drivers handle that for the program, and abstract away the underlying complexities and mechanisms of how the GPU operates. All the driver has to do is expose a system call or two. The problem arises when you try to slip in max as the supposed "operating system"
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib High contrast, subtitles, etc etc etc. are solved problems and games already do them. keyboard navigation is a solved problem because any game that wants to support a gamepad needs it. Anyone who wants to make a little in-game screen reader can with little to no effort by just making things speak when they get focus, and we can't make a multi-framework option because 99% of the time the UI is private to the game anyway. The rest of accessibility is specific to the gameplay. But in general, everything but blindness is already solved and you can just get Unity plugins for it if it's not built in by default.Have you actually built a game before or are you just saying this stuff? A lot of people forget just because its not part of the dev cycle. There is a real material element to bringing a game to production and a lot of that is what leads to basic "simple" accessibility fixes being lost in the wayside. This is again another reason why you can't rely on developers distributing UIs. Like look, just because ian hamilton gets paid to guilt trip developers into remembering this shit doesn't mean it actually works as an effective means of accessibility.Can you explain in a basic way for those of us who don't get this what exactly it's going to do? From my understanding, a dev can take your tool and make their up coming game accessible, is that right? But if that's so, why use your tool when they could build there own speaking menus etc?I think an analogy for people with no real technical understanding would be like this. Take me (sighted) and you (blind). The game is outside, where there are physically things that are happening that we interpret, I have a sighted interpretation and you have a blind interpretation. Outside is still consistent but we're organizing that stuff differently because your eyes dont work and mine do. We both have unique subjective ways of understanding the same world, and because of this, we interact with it in unique ways too.In a game, you have environments or UIs that have information literally in memory chilling out. What Max does is it makes it really easy to rearrange how that information is accessed, via a UI, and also changes how you interact with it - a lot of people think that a UI is just how you navigate/interpret these environments but it's also how you physically interface back to the game itself. So then you develop this back and forth response similar to the back and forth response you have when using your senses to navigate the real world. And just like how I'm sighted and you're blind, two different UI modules will cause a game to react differently because it's reading the movements slightly differently.Building anything in a game can take a lot of time; which is part of the reason why accessibility is neglected in the first place. Expecting devs to take care of this is inefficient, and as I stated previously there are a lot of problems with a privately owned boxed solution like an accessible Unity/UE4.Actually now I think on it, why would a blind dev want to use your tool? Surely if they were making an audiogame they'd already have the skillset to make that game and wouldn't need your app? I'm quite confused.This is actually a really good question that I think I should talk about more. First, most of the same reasons that a sighted dev would want to use Max (open source core, moddability, multiple language implementations, cross compatibility). But also, because Max is designed to be agnostic with how it manages its resources, audio game developers can build a game that sighted people can later mod and add graphics to or change the topology to, making audio games more accessible to the general public; while still containing the core original UI. It also allows both audio game devs and sighted devs to focus more on producing a preferred UI because it can simply be changed out for a different one.Also, Max enables accessibility for other disabilities as well. If you were to make a game with Max, you could feasibly make a blind-sighted-deaf pipeline without enforcing a UI.the problem with your agnosticism comparison between operating systems and actual games/game engines is that an operating system provides critical services and functionality required for a game -- or any executable binary, for that matter, in some executable format like ELF or PE -- to be executed and to function properly. It does this through abstractions like system calls and other mechanisms to abstract away the underlying physical machine from the programs that actually run on it. A program does not need to be aware of, for example, how a pixel is drawn onto the screen because the GPU drivers handle that for the program, and abstract away the underlying complexities and mechanisms of how the GPU operates. All the driver has to do is expose a system call or two. The problem arises when you try to slip in max as the supposed "operating system"
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib High contrast, subtitles, etc etc etc. are solved problems and games already do them. keyboard navigation is a solved problem because any game that wants to support a gamepad needs it. Anyone who wants to make a little in-game screen reader can with little to no effort by just making things speak when they get focus, and we can't make a multi-framework option because 99% of the time the UI is private to the game anyway. The rest of accessibility is specific to the gameplay. But in general, everything but blindness is already solved and you can just get Unity plugins for it if it's not built in by default.Have you actually built a game before or are you just saying this stuff? A lot of people forget just because its not part of the dev cycle. There is a real material element to bringing a game to production and a lot of that is what leads to basic "simple" accessibility fixes being lost in the wayside. This is again another reason why you can't rely on developers distributing UIs.Can you explain in a basic way for those of us who don't get this what exactly it's going to do? From my understanding, a dev can take your tool and make their up coming game accessible, is that right? But if that's so, why use your tool when they could build there own speaking menus etc?I think an analogy for people with no real technical understanding would be like this. Take me (sighted) and you (blind). The game is outside, where there are physically things that are happening that we interpret, I have a sighted interpretation and you have a blind interpretation. Outside is still consistent but we're organizing that stuff differently because your eyes dont work and mine do. We both have unique subjective ways of understanding the same world, and because of this, we interact with it in unique ways too.In a game, you have environments or UIs that have information literally in memory chilling out. What Max does is it makes it really easy to rearrange how that information is accessed, via a UI, and also changes how you interact with it - a lot of people think that a UI is just how you navigate/interpret these environments but it's also how you physically interface back to the game itself. So then you develop this back and forth response similar to the back and forth response you have when using your senses to navigate the real world. And just like how I'm sighted and you're blind, two different UI modules will cause a game to react differently because it's reading the movements slightly differently.Building anything in a game can take a lot of time; which is part of the reason why accessibility is neglected in the first place. Expecting devs to take care of this is inefficient, and as I stated previously there are a lot of problems with a privately owned boxed solution like an accessible Unity/UE4.Actually now I think on it, why would a blind dev want to use your tool? Surely if they were making an audiogame they'd already have the skillset to make that game and wouldn't need your app? I'm quite confused.This is actually a really good question that I think I should talk about more. First, most of the same reasons that a sighted dev would want to use Max (open source core, moddability, multiple language implementations, cross compatibility). But also, because Max is designed to be agnostic with how it manages its resources, audio game developers can build a game that sighted people can later mod and add graphics to or change the topology to, making audio games more accessible to the general public; while still containing the core original UI. It also allows both audio game devs and sighted devs to focus more on producing a preferred UI because it can simply be changed out for a different one.Also, Max enables accessibility for other disabilities as well. If you were to make a game with Max, you could feasibly make a blind-sighted-deaf pipeline without enforcing a UI.the problem with your agnosticism comparison between operating systems and actual games/game engines is that an operating system provides critical services and functionality required for a game -- or any executable binary, for that matter, in some executable format like ELF or PE -- to be executed and to function properly. It does this through abstractions like system calls and other mechanisms to abstract away the underlying physical machine from the programs that actually run on it. A program does not need to be aware of, for example, how a pixel is drawn onto the screen because the GPU drivers handle that for the program, and abstract away the underlying complexities and mechanisms of how the GPU operates. All the driver has to do is expose a system call or two. The problem arises when you try to slip in max as the supposed "operating system" abstraction layer. You can't. That is the hard, cold truth. The only way your going to get this to work with mainstream game engines that may not even have plugin
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib High contrast, subtitles, etc etc etc. are solved problems and games already do them. keyboard navigation is a solved problem because any game that wants to support a gamepad needs it. Anyone who wants to make a little in-game screen reader can with little to no effort by just making things speak when they get focus, and we can't make a multi-framework option because 99% of the time the UI is private to the game anyway. The rest of accessibility is specific to the gameplay. But in general, everything but blindness is already solved and you can just get Unity plugins for it if it's not built in by default.Have you actually built a game before or are you just saying this stuff? A lot of people forget just because its not part of the dev cycle. There is a real material element to bringing a game to production and a lot of that is what leads to basic "simple" accessibility fixes being lost in the wayside. This is again another reason why you can't rely on developers distributing UIs.Can you explain in a basic way for those of us who don't get this what exactly it's going to do? From my understanding, a dev can take your tool and make their up coming game accessible, is that right? But if that's so, why use your tool when they could build there own speaking menus etc?I think an analogy for people with no real technical understanding would be like this. Take me (sighted) and you (blind). The game is outside, where there are physically things that are happening that we interpret, I have a sighted interpretation and you have a blind interpretation. Outside is still consistent but we're organizing that stuff differently because your eyes dont work and mine do.In a game, you have environments or UIs that have information literally in memory chilling out. What Max does is it makes it really easy to rearrange how that information is accessed, via a UI, and also changes how you interact with it - a lot of people think that a UI is just how you navigate/interpret these environments but it's also how you physically interface back to the game itself. So then you develop this back and forth response similar to the back and forth response you have when using your senses to navigate the real world.Building anything in a game can take a lot of time; which is part of the reason why accessibility is neglected in the first place. Expecting devs to take care of this is inefficient, and as I stated previously there are a lot of problems with a privately owned boxed solution like an accessible Unity/UE4.Actually now I think on it, why would a blind dev want to use your tool? Surely if they were making an audiogame they'd already have the skillset to make that game and wouldn't need your app? I'm quite confused.This is actually a really good question that I think I should talk about more. First, most of the same reasons that a sighted dev would want to use Max (open source core, moddability, multiple language implementations, cross compatibility). But also, because Max is designed to be agnostic with how it manages its resources, audio game developers can build a game that sighted people can later mod and add graphics to or change the topology to, making audio games more accessible to the general public; while still containing the core original UI. It also allows both audio game devs and sighted devs to focus more on producing a preferred UI because it can simply be changed out for a different one.Also, Max enables accessibility for other disabilities as well. If you were to make a game with Max, you could feasibly make a blind-sighted-deaf pipeline without enforcing a UI.the problem with your agnosticism comparison between operating systems and actual games/game engines is that an operating system provides critical services and functionality required for a game -- or any executable binary, for that matter, in some executable format like ELF or PE -- to be executed and to function properly. It does this through abstractions like system calls and other mechanisms to abstract away the underlying physical machine from the programs that actually run on it. A program does not need to be aware of, for example, how a pixel is drawn onto the screen because the GPU drivers handle that for the program, and abstract away the underlying complexities and mechanisms of how the GPU operates. All the driver has to do is expose a system call or two. The problem arises when you try to slip in max as the supposed "operating system" abstraction layer. You can't. That is the hard, cold truth. The only way your going to get this to work with mainstream game engines that may not even have plugin support is to write a kernel-mode driver that intercepts graphics calls. Max will not be what you think it will be. It cannot be an agnostic mechanism for any game engine to use because even if you were to make it agnostic, a game engine will still have to implement its facilities. You can't just drop
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib @9High contrast, subtitles, etc etc etc. are solved problems and games already do them. keyboard navigation is a solved problem because any game that wants to support a gamepad needs it. Anyone who wants to make a little in-game screen reader can with little to no effort by just making things speak when they get focus, and we can't make a multi-framework option because 99% of the time the UI is private to the game anyway. The rest of accessibility is specific to the gameplay. But in general, everything but blindness is already solved and you can just get Unity plugins for it if it's not built in by default.We would have better games if we had better tools. People here don't even know trig. People keep explaining things like how to update the game with a delta every tick. If I (as a new programmer, not as myself) sit down and want to make Shades of Doom I have to start with math that I only learn as a high school senior at best, and often not at all because I'm blind. What tools exist can't be debugged, are inaccessible, etc etc etc. While on the one hand you're right that there's an attention span problem, it takes an order of magnitude more effort than it should to even get to the point of "My character can walk around and I can save the game". "My character can walk around and I can save the game" could and should be 30 to 50 lines of code and no math learning. The real problem with attention spans is that this takes an ecosystem and only a few of us here know how to even start building one, and it takes a manual and tutorials, which have to be written by someone who has a full understanding of the concepts involved, and if you try to do it from the ground up you're going to spend months until there's something worth showing.@12If you read my post again, I sort of carved you out as your own category. I don't think you'll succeed, but you've picked a reasonable avenue of attack on an actually open source engine that we have enough control over and have said reasonable things about the scope of what you want to do with it. You're basically the only person who has talked about this from the perspective of being able to propose something that's at least this side of possible, and also from the perspective of having some understanding of the coding effort. Almost without exception, every other time someone has started this discussion ends at "and then big corporations have to care and give us access to Unity" or similar (and that includes this thread, honestly).I still think you fail in the end, either because it's such a long project that something pulls you and/or anyone else with the skills to do it off, or because it turns out that really most sighted people don't care even if the pieces exist. I think in the end probably a mix of both. But you're not proposing something infeasible, there's a difference between infeasible and multi-year personal software project, and it's not like your chances are concretely worse than the 90% or so of other multi-year personal software projects that have failed.You've been around less long than me. The thing is that there have been so many iterations of this discussion over the years that I can't count them. It's recently become more popular, but "what if all the sighted games were accessible" is the audiogame equivalent of the "what if I go become a firefighter, blind people can totally do anything" attitude. I think you'd be more impactful if you wrote an engine for audiogames, by my measure of "do we have good games". But you have a different metric of productivity than me here, which is fine, it's not morals. And also it's not that I think it shouldn't be done either. I may not jump on the bandwagon, but if someone lays out a possible strategy and has sound technical/social reasons as to why it might be possible, go for it, I'm not going to shoot it down.But the problem is, you're the only one who has. Everyone else in this category just sort of spins their wheels on it, flails around, and thinks they're making progress, or pines for it and doesn't do anything realistic instead.@13I don't even know where to start on this. Reinventing all of UI, then hoping that everyone is going to jump on how you reinvented all of UI, and somehow this is going to solve accessibility and make an endlessly customizable game engine where everyone can swap the components for their accessibility needs? And also game engines are going to make accessibility laws to shut each other down? No, that's not going to happen. Also, frankly, Discord probably cares about accessibility for the educational market, not because games have to be accessible. Things like the CVAA hit games because the requirements just happened to include them, anyway, not because the goal was make games accessible--your XBox is covered because your XBox also does things like let you watch TV, not because it's to do with games.If big game
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib @13, the problem with your agnosticism comparison between operating systems and actual games/game engines is that an operating system provides critical services and functionality required for a game -- or any executable binary, for that matter, in some executable format like ELF or PE -- to be executed and to function properly. It does this through abstractions like system calls and other mechanisms to abstract away the underlying physical machine from the programs that actually run on it. A program does not need to be aware of, for example, how a pixel is drawn onto the screen because the GPU drivers handle that for the program, and abstract away the underlying complexities and mechanisms of how the GPU operates. All the driver has to do is expose a system call or two. The problem arises when you try to slip in max as the supposed "operating system" abstraction layer. You can't. That is the hard, cold truth. The only way your going to get this to work with mainstream game engines that may not even have plugin support is to write a kernel-mode driver that intercepts graphics calls. Max will not be what you think it will be. It cannot be an agnostic mechanism for any game engine to use because even if you were to make it agnostic, a game engine will still have to implement its facilities. You can't just drop Max into (say) MK 11 and expect it to work out of the box; MK 11 has to be able to support Max, to detect it even exists, and to utilize it. That is why Camlorn said that this was such an infeasible goal. The comparison between OS and Max being some kind of plugin just doesn't hold -- an OS is about a million times more complex, and far lower level, than Max is. And making it agnostic through a kernel-mode driver will be a very, very non-trivial task, because every kernel-mode environment is different on every operating system. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/536721/#p536721 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib @13, the problem with your agnosticism comparison between operating systems and actual games/game engines is that an operating system provides critical services and functionality required for a game -- or any executable binary, for that matter, in some executable format like ELF or PE -- to be executed and to function properly. It does this through abstractions like system calls and other mechanisms to abstract away the underlying physical machine from the programs that actually run on it. A program does not need to be aware of, for example, how a pixel is drawn onto the screen because the GPU drivers handle that for the program, and abstract away the underlying complexities and mechanisms of how the GPU operates. All the driver has to do is expose a system call or two. The problem arises when you try to slip in max as the supposed "operating system" abstraction layer. You can't. That is the hard, cold truth. The only way your going to get this to work with mainstream game engines that may not even have plugin support is to write a kernel-mode driver that intercepts graphics calls. Max will not be what you think it will be. It cannot be an agnostic mechanism for any game engine to use because even if you were to make it agnostic, a game engine will still have to implement its facilities. You can't just drop Max into (say) MK 11 and expect it to work out of the box; MK 11 has to be able to support Max, to detect it even exists, and to utilize it. That is why Camlorn said that this was such an infeasible goal. The comparison between OS and Max being some kind of plugin just doesn't hold -- an OS is about a million times more complex, and far lower level, than Max is. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/536721/#p536721 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib Hi.@daigonite, No, I don't think I'm proud of being able to play a video game. for me it's more like, oh that's a nice thing or in the case of Last of us 2, wow that sounds awesome! But pride, nah.Can you explain in a basic way for those of us who don't get this what exactly it's going to do? From my understanding, a dev can take your tool and make their up coming game accessible, is that right? But if that's so, why use your tool when they could build there own speaking menus etc?What makes your tool special?Actually now I think on it, why would a blind dev want to use your tool? Surely if they were making an audiogame they'd already have the skillset to make that game and wouldn't need your app? I'm quite confused. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/536710/#p536710 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib lol I literally made this thread to give an update and got the gamer response, here goes, I got a few replies since these are long.@8also I will just say what no one else is saying: your project is technically infeasible. It'll never be finished, and when anyone asks "should I use Max or write it myself" they're just going to write it themselves, because writing it themselves by calling TTS is pretty easy but using some baroque thing that tries to somehow be game agnostic is hard and costs money by taking expensive programmer-hours. You can't make this agnostic. The UI is almost always tied tightly to the gameplay.This view comes from a naive understanding of the interaction between UI and process, encouraged by the way we develop video games. In comparison, while complete UI agnosticism is truly impossible, high levels of agnosticism can be observed directly in an operating system - the problem is that the development of this agnosticism is not encouraged because of systemic design problems in both project management (as seen in Linux) and ownership (as seen on Windows). In fact operating systems are designed to be agnostic to some extent. This is basically how Max is designed.You can't convince any of the people you want to somehow prevent from doing whatever it is you think they're going to do instead that they need to try to use whatever it is you think you can build, which frankly is incredibly unclear at this point anyway. All that's here is aspirational statements. "It's JSON for accessibility" is only a good way to put things if you're a unicorn startup revolutionizing quantum uber ride-scheduling technology or something.Yeah bro, that's why I linked the source. I should have stated where we are in the project, we just got the object-memory model working. Currently, my friend is working on cross compatibility with windows (which will also have useful applications outside of this project) but hopefully after that we hope to have the core linked to the C# abstraction soon. However we had to take away resources for a little bit to work on something else this week.Basically how it works is it uses a messaging system to communicate between an information-space (where all the game data is stored) and a UI space, which is generated by an external module. The module parses the information differnetly. It rearranges the objects and how you interact with them based on these modules. We're probably going to change them a lot over time to adapt to the needs of the engine, and I want to release a few out-of-the-box basic accessibility modules that can be used as templates for future modules developed by blind-only people (or other kinds of disabled people)You have to remember that a lot of the sighted-dev-imposing-structure stuff coming from accessibility comes from having to develop one UI that achieves all tasks, Max is trying to rearrange how we develop UI in general.I didn't want to get into too many technical details in my OP to not overwhelm people because its a very technical task.We expect a release by the end of the year. If we don't we'll give an update. We plan on using a similar UI topology for the sneak program we're currently prioritizing so hopefully we can prove that the model works sooner than that - developing a whole game engine that manages memory and is cross compatible on the machine level is extremely difficult and takes time.The first step of software engineering for a multi-year project is to recognize that it's going to be a multi-year project, but the second step is to scope it, which you don't seem to have done. If you get halfway through your long-running project and basically start over, that's not a good sign that you understand the problem and more than anything should be telling you that you maybe should step back until you do.Yes, this is because I got a new developer who helped me develop the main abstraction of our ideas. We are aware that the project is a several year project. I was not "half-way" through my project, I just started and went through several refactors before settling on this design, and I think that based on its capabilities we shouldn't require any other major refactors. Max is very early in development. It's also extremely naive to assume that you will know where a project will be in a few years time, the waterfall method does not work for software development and this has been proven repeatedly in industry for years.But fine, let's say that it's technically feasible and everything is amazing and you've got a release tomorrow. This doesn't give us any sort of control over anything. If you're right about how big tech is going to try to take over game accessibility through whatever narrative you've arrived at, you've done nothing to stop it. They'll just disregard you and do it anyway.No, we would have created a game engine where blind people can develop their own modules to organize the game
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib lol I literally made this thread to give an update and got the gamer response, here goes, I got a few replies since these are long.@8also I will just say what no one else is saying: your project is technically infeasible. It'll never be finished, and when anyone asks "should I use Max or write it myself" they're just going to write it themselves, because writing it themselves by calling TTS is pretty easy but using some baroque thing that tries to somehow be game agnostic is hard and costs money by taking expensive programmer-hours. You can't make this agnostic. The UI is almost always tied tightly to the gameplay.This view comes from a naive understanding of the interaction between UI and process, encouraged by the way we develop video games. In comparison, while complete UI agnosticism is truly impossible, high levels of agnosticism can be observed directly in an operating system - the problem is that the development of this agnosticism is not encouraged because of systemic design problems in both project management (as seen in Linux) and ownership (as seen on Windows). In fact operating systems are designed to be agnostic to some extent. This is basically how Max is designed.You can't convince any of the people you want to somehow prevent from doing whatever it is you think they're going to do instead that they need to try to use whatever it is you think you can build, which frankly is incredibly unclear at this point anyway. All that's here is aspirational statements. "It's JSON for accessibility" is only a good way to put things if you're a unicorn startup revolutionizing quantum uber ride-scheduling technology or something.Yeah bro, that's why I linked the source. I should have stated where we are in the project, we just got the object-memory model working. Currently, my friend is working on cross compatibility with windows (which will also have useful applications outside of this project) but hopefully after that we hope to have the core linked to the C# abstraction soon. However we had to take away resources for a little bit to work on something else this week.Basically how it works is it uses a messaging system to communicate between an information-space (where all the game data is stored) and a UI space, which is generated by an external module. The module parses the information differnetly. It rearranges the objects and how you interact with them based on these modules. We're probably going to change them a lot over time to adapt to the needs of the engine, and I want to release a few out-of-the-box basic accessibility modules that can be used as templates for future modules developed by blind-only people (or other kinds of disabled people)You have to remember that a lot of the sighted-dev-imposing-structure stuff coming from accessibility comes from having to develop one UI that achieves all tasks, Max is trying to rearrange how we develop UI in general.I didn't want to get into too many technical details in my OP to not overwhelm people because its a very technical task.We expect a release by the end of the year. If we don't we'll give an update. We plan on using a similar UI topology for the sneak program we're currently prioritizing so hopefully we can prove that the model works sooner than that - developing a whole game engine that manages memory and is cross compatible on the machine level is extremely difficult and takes time.The first step of software engineering for a multi-year project is to recognize that it's going to be a multi-year project, but the second step is to scope it, which you don't seem to have done. If you get halfway through your long-running project and basically start over, that's not a good sign that you understand the problem and more than anything should be telling you that you maybe should step back until you do.Yes, this is because I got a new developer who helped me develop the main abstraction of our ideas. We are aware that the project is a several year project. I was not "half-way" through my project, I just started and went through several refactors before settling on this design, and I think that based on its capabilities we shouldn't require any other major refactors. Max is very early in development. It's also extremely naive to assume that you will know where a project will be in a few years time, the waterfall method does not work for software development and this has been proven repeatedly in industry for years.But fine, let's say that it's technically feasible and everything is amazing and you've got a release tomorrow. This doesn't give us any sort of control over anything. If you're right about how big tech is going to try to take over game accessibility through whatever narrative you've arrived at, you've done nothing to stop it. They'll just disregard you and do it anyway.No, we would have created a game engine where blind people can develop their own modules to organize the game
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib lol I literally made this thread to give an update and got the gamer response, here goes, I got a few replies since these are long.@8also I will just say what no one else is saying: your project is technically infeasible. It'll never be finished, and when anyone asks "should I use Max or write it myself" they're just going to write it themselves, because writing it themselves by calling TTS is pretty easy but using some baroque thing that tries to somehow be game agnostic is hard and costs money by taking expensive programmer-hours. You can't make this agnostic. The UI is almost always tied tightly to the gameplay.This view comes from a naive understanding of the interaction between UI and process, encouraged by the way we develop video games. In comparison, while complete UI agnosticism is truly impossible, high levels of agnosticism can be observed directly in an operating system - the problem is that the development of this agnosticism is not encouraged because of systemic design problems in both project management (as seen in Linux) and ownership (as seen on Windows). In fact operating systems are designed to be agnostic to some extent.You can't convince any of the people you want to somehow prevent from doing whatever it is you think they're going to do instead that they need to try to use whatever it is you think you can build, which frankly is incredibly unclear at this point anyway. All that's here is aspirational statements. "It's JSON for accessibility" is only a good way to put things if you're a unicorn startup revolutionizing quantum uber ride-scheduling technology or something.Yeah bro, that's why I linked the source. I should have stated where we are in the project, we just got the object-memory model working. Currently, my friend is working on cross compatibility with windows (which will also have useful applications outside of this project) but hopefully after that we hope to have the core linked to the C# abstraction soon. However we had to take away resources for a little bit to work on something else this week.Basically how it works is it uses a messaging system to communicate between an information-space (where all the game data is stored) and a UI space, which is generated by an external module. The module parses the information differnetly. It rearranges the objects and how you interact with them based on these modules. We're probably going to change them a lot over time to adapt to the needs of the engine, and I want to release a few out-of-the-box basic accessibility modules that can be used as templates for future modules developed by blind-only people (or other kinds of disabled people)You have to remember that a lot of the sighted-dev-imposing-structure stuff coming from accessibility comes from having to develop one UI that achieves all tasks, Max is trying to rearrange how we develop UI in general.I didn't want to get into too many technical details in my OP to not overwhelm people because its a very technical task.We expect a release by the end of the year. If we don't we'll give an update. We plan on using a similar UI topology for the sneak program we're currently prioritizing so hopefully we can prove that the model works sooner than that - developing a whole game engine that manages memory and is cross compatible on the machine level is extremely difficult and takes time.The first step of software engineering for a multi-year project is to recognize that it's going to be a multi-year project, but the second step is to scope it, which you don't seem to have done. If you get halfway through your long-running project and basically start over, that's not a good sign that you understand the problem and more than anything should be telling you that you maybe should step back until you do.Yes, this is because I got a new developer who helped me develop the main abstraction of our ideas. We are aware that the project is a several year project. I was not "half-way" through my project, I just started and went through several refactors before settling on this design, and I think that based on its capabilities we shouldn't require any other major refactors. Max is very early in development. It's also extremely naive to assume that you will know where a project will be in a few years time, the waterfall method does not work for software development and this has been proven repeatedly in industry for years.But fine, let's say that it's technically feasible and everything is amazing and you've got a release tomorrow. This doesn't give us any sort of control over anything. If you're right about how big tech is going to try to take over game accessibility through whatever narrative you've arrived at, you've done nothing to stop it. They'll just disregard you and do it anyway.No, we would have created a game engine where blind people can develop their own modules to organize the game data in ways that make sense for them,
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib @8 Generally agreed with you, though I think your categorizations here are a bit simplistic. I guess by your reckoning I'm in category #3, though I prefer to think that the way many of us are doing things here is a bit wrong. We have the blind gamers' pool, which we seem to keep separate from the sighted gamers' pool. I understand why this is in large part--it's significantly easier to build an audio-only game engine than it is to bolt accessibility onto Godot or Unity or whatever. On the other hand, we have a few sighted folks trying to build games for us. Maybe their prototypes or final products are terrible. Maybe they start out at 50% good, then over long and elaborate iterative feedback things get to 80% or 90%. I generally don't fault them for this since it's a very hard problem. But look at the navigation systems behind, say, Papa Sangre and A Hero's Call. The former is very simplistic[1] while the latter is much more intricate. I think it's fair to say that the former was designed mostly if not entirely by sighted developers, while the latter was mostly if not entirely created by blind developers. As an aside, in the department of Research I'll Likely Never See But Wish I Could(TM), I'd like to see how cohorts of early and late-blind players interact with and assess the difficulty of navigation systems like those in Papa Sangre/Somethin Else and A Hero's Call. I suspect late-blind players may in general have a harder time with the latter, but of course could be wrong.My point is, if we want more compelling games, they need to be for-us-by-us. Falling Squirrel shouldn't have to lob a prototype over the fence every few months. They should be able to bring on a blind developer or two to hammer on the combat system such that, when it finally reaches playtesters, it's at 70%-80% rather than 40%-50%. Then maybe their next iteration gets them to 95% rather than 70%. But that couldn't happen even if they wanted it to, short of me or some other developer having very limited access to Unity, having to hack together scenes to test every single system rather than just loading up and dropping into one, etc.And yes, before AudioQuake/the recent Doom mod get trotted out, I know about those. They don't reflect my intentions, which is why I think your category system is a bit simplistic. I think there's a huge realm of accessibility possibilities between, say, Shades of Doom being accessible at one end, and the recent Doom remake being inaccessible at the other. Audio-only game engines get us partway there, but the next step is some level of developer accessibility to more mainstream engines. We may not be able to create the next fast-reaction multiplayer FPS, but there's plenty of space in between to have blind and sighted players and developers playing in the same pool. Not every online multiplayer game requires fast reaction times or is competitive. Hell, not every game is online, multiplayer, or competitive. So what if some game has a slightly easier accessibility mode but otherwise compelling systems and rich access to those? If your goal as a developer is creating an environment where all players can have fun, rather than wracking up the most points, there are even *more* possibilities of games that could be both accessible and shared experiences.Having said that, I do agree in general that the work described here is ambitious and not well-scoped.1. While the movement system of Papa Sangre/Nightjar were simplistic, I think the mechanics had you contemplating and putting a larger amount of effort into every motion, which arguably is how good stealth works. One of my long-term game ideas is a more complex tactical roguelike with stealth, and I could see myself using a Papa Sangre-style motion system that simplified the controls and made sneaking something you *really* have to work at and think about. Up against a wall? Better turn vry slowly to keep the noise down, and only take a step forward when you're mostly through that turn as to not make more sound than necessary. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/536621/#p536621 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib Hi.I agree with defender about your anger.I don't fully understand this topic, but I remember a time a year or so ago you made a topic about a screen reader plug in thing that would become like a treeview and allow blind people to find the heading treeview then arrow through all the headings, or something along those lines.I told you back then that screen readers can already do this and this is not something that blind people would use and you basicly sent me a PM telling me to stop talking about things I don't understand. The thing is daigonite, I do understand this. I've been using screen readers for around 18 years of my life and I know exactly what people would and wouldn't want. How do I know this? because screen readers can already do this.Listen to what blind peple, the users of the software you want to make better, have to say and take it on bored because if you don't, you won't get anyware.I felt attacked back then and didn't know how to defend myself but now I do, ask us, blind people, what we want and go from there, don't just make something because you think it will help us and ignore people telling you this project isn't needed. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/536616/#p536616 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib @daigoniteWhat you seem to be not understanding is that while initially making a big noise and forcing people to take notice is the way to start making lasting change, but that communication, education, and compromise is the way to make it stick.Very few people are capable of doing both things, flipping the switch and going from one to the other, so I've always said that it's the responsibility of the firebrand to no when to shut up and let the cooler heads do the talking, while it's the responsibility of the diplomat to respect the need for the firebrand and not give up too much of what was fought for at the negotiation table.Frankly, you have absolutely no chill when it comes to this subject, and even though I agree with many of your points and find them insightful, and I respect your rite to be angry with the status quo, you won't get far with this attitude when it comes to getting people to use your tools.You say that you don't need to be a diplomat because your just creating integrations with these corporation's products, but in the high likelihood that something changes in the code on their end that stops your plugin from working and you can't fix it your self, you'll need to make a convincing case for them to fix that issue.You intend to court individual developers rather than publishers, but assuming you aren't intending on only indi adoption, aren't the publishers the ones who decide which features to prioritize and spend extra time/money on?Besides, to be honest, your almost fanatical anger at the entire system is going to make even developers cautious of working with your product, simply because of how divisive your views are. After all, people often don't like it when you try to convince them to do something by angrily forcing it down their throats and making them feel ashamed for not doing it them selves earlier.Look. All I'm saying is that if you want this to be adopted widely by the very system you have so many problems with, than you need to cut back on the accusations and tangents when discussing the project publicly. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/536569/#p536569 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib @CamlernYou are likely correct about accessibility patents being extremely low on the list of concerns for game publishers, but I believe that daigonite's point about morality points and achieving a bare minimum for compliance while putting misleading accessibility labels on their titles is a good, if somewhat pessimistic observation. I've seen similar many times my self, and while I view it as more of an incentive for them to continue with what they do have, and an example to other publishers of what the PR can do for them rather than a detriment to us, I too believe that it sets the bar very low.Weather it's a start of something better down the road, or a dead end will remain to be seen. But at least captioning, simple color inversion, and high contrast settings will still allow hundreds of thousands more to enjoy those titles even if we can't.When it comes to mainstream gaming, I disagree that focusing our efforts there is a waste of time. To be sure it's a slow process, and legally blind users are both small in market share and some of the hardest to make useful adaptations for, I won't argue with that.However, considering that at least two larger PC titles and several smaller ones have integrated screen reader support directly into their games in the last few years, the built in screen reader for Windows has become far more advanced, realtime OCR has improved greatly in accuracy and speed, accessibility integration is increasingly being considered as a path along side the project's development cycle rather than an unwieldy addition after the fact, and the number of tools used for creating the majority of new games has shrunk to just two or three recently, it seems as though a concerted effort to create, keep current, and propagate easily implemented methods for those tools could be a likely root to success.We will never be able to experience the full depth of a visual based game without sight, and some genres will always present allot more challenges than others, but I believe that we could get at least half way there if we tried.I won't discard what this community has made for it's self as inferior garbage like some do, but it seems as though even our best titles are at least a decade behind the rest of the market, and I feel as though the chance to reach even 50% parody with the rest of the world is still worth allot. Plus, even if we were given better tools to work with, we are still a small, largely unskilled, often scattered community, and as has been shown time and time again, very few of us are even capable of sticking with a project long enough, or cooperating effectively enough to see a large game through to completion anyway.And that overarching issue won't be solved with better tools, even if parts of it may be improved by them. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/536561/#p536561 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib @CamlernYou are likely correct about accessibility patents being extremely low on the list of concerns for game publishers, but I believe that daigonite's point about morality points and achieving a bare minimum for compliance while putting misleading accessibility labels on their titles is a good, if somewhat pessimistic observation. I've seen similar many times my self, and while I view it as more of an incentive for them to continue with what they do have, and an example to other publishers of what the PR can do for them rather than a detriment to us, I too believe that it sets the bar very low.Weather it's a start of something better down the road, or a dead end will remain to be seen. But at least captioning, simple color inversion, and high contrast settings will still allow tens of thousands more to enjoy those titles, even if we can't.When it comes to mainstream gaming, I disagree that focusing our efforts there is a waste of time. To be sure it's a slow process, and legally blind users are both small in market share and some of the hardest to make useful adaptations for, I won't argue with that.However, considering that at least two larger PC titles and several smaller ones have integrated screen reader support directly into their games in the last few years, the built in screen reader for Windows has become far more advanced, realtime OCR has improved greatly in accuracy and speed, accessibility integration is increasingly being considered as a path along side the project's development cycle rather than an unwieldy addition after the fact, and the number of tools used for creating the majority of new games has shrunk to just two or three recently, it seems as though a concerted effort to create, keep current, and propagate easily implemented methods for those tools could be a likely root to success.We will never be able to experience the full depth of a visual based game without sight, and some genres will always present allot more challenges than others, but I believe that we could get at least half way there if we tried.I won't discard what this community has made for it's self as inferior garbage like some do, but it seems as though even our best titles are at least a decade behind the rest of the market, and I feel as though the chance to reach even 50% parody with the rest of the world is still worth allot. Plus, even if we were given better tools to work with, we are still a small, largely unskilled, often scattered community, and as has been shown time and time again, very few of us are even capable of sticking with a project long enough, or cooperating effectively enough to see a large game through to completion anyway.And that overarching issue won't be solved with better tools, even if parts of it may be improved by them. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/536561/#p536561 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib It is possible to write a third party screen reader for Mac. No one has done it because no one cares enough, but as far as I know nothing has changed since I last looked into what it would take and it can be done. It isn't possible to write a third party screen reader for iOS for the same reason that it isn't possible to do lots of things on iOS, and no part of that is specific to blind people. I'd be willing to bet someone at Apple would love to give us third party screen readers, but that's root-level access to the phone, and at the end of the day that's the end of it, not some sort of leveraging blind people for market control conspiracy.also I will just say what no one else is saying: your project is technically infeasible. It'll never be finished, and when anyone asks "should I use Max or write it myself" they're just going to write it themselves, because writing it themselves by calling TTS is pretty easy but using some baroque thing that tries to somehow be game agnostic is hard and costs money by taking expensive programmer-hours. You can't make this agnostic. The UI is almost always tied tightly to the gameplay. You can't convince any of the people you want to somehow prevent from doing whatever it is you think they're going to do instead that they need to try to use whatever it is you think you can build, which frankly is incredibly unclear at this point anyway. All that's here is aspirational statements. "It's JSON for accessibility" is only a good way to put things if you're a unicorn startup revolutionizing quantum uber ride-scheduling technology or something.Also have you looked into engine plug-ins? Because that's not going to be nearly so easy as you think it is either. I would go so far as to say it's impossible in at least some cases, possibly almost all.Nolan's Godot stuff at least has an end state to it, in that there's a concrete set of deliverables and a tight enough scope, and once he's past a certain point it has immediate value to everyone who cares. It's a herculean effort and I don't expect to see anything major out of it soon if ever, but it's doable. He found a difficult but reasonable place to attack the problem at with a community that's likely to be receptive and a tech stack where he has the levels of access necessary at all levels without relying on the goodwill of others. The first step of software engineering for a multi-year project is to recognize that it's going to be a multi-year project, but the second step is to scope it, which you don't seem to have done. If you get halfway through your long-running project and basically start over, that's not a good sign that you understand the problem and more than anything should be telling you that you maybe should step back until you do.But fine, let's say that it's technically feasible and everything is amazing and you've got a release tomorrow. This doesn't give us any sort of control over anything. If you're right about how big tech is going to try to take over game accessibility through whatever narrative you've arrived at, you've done nothing to stop it. They'll just disregard you and do it anyway. Not that that matters, because frankly your narrative comes off as very paranoid, not thought through at all, and I could poke a lot more holes in it. If game company a patents accessibility technology a, game company b will just not use it and game company b will lose basically 0 users compared to the actual userbase; and laws around gaming accessibility are very far off, impractically difficult to write, and will probably never happen in any widespread fashion if they can at all. There's not going to be some accessibility patent war because game accessibility patents aren't worth money, and you can only hold a patent over someone if it's going to cost them a lot of money to not license it from you. Screen readers were able to have some of this because screen reader patents have value due to things like 508 and the ADA, but none of this exists in games land.So, genuinely, what is the value? Why wasn't it better to have just made audiogame unity or something? You're not actually telling anyone what your project is despite this being a long-standing project and it doesn't (and can't) accomplish the social goals you want it to accomplish either. Like with the GTA stuff, the primary goal of proving that sighted games could be made accessible in some cases has already been proven by Audioquake, Sequence Storm, probably others.I used to think there were 2 kinds of audiogame programmer: the people who are learning, and the people who went off and got a job in programming and don't have the time anymore. But over the last few months it appears there is now a third archetype: the programmer who thinks that somehow what we need is to make all of sighted gaming accessible, rather than solving the much easier problem of actually having any sort of quality
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib @4However, to be clear, I feel really confused by sentences like: the mainstream game industry wants to take control of the accessibility gaming. Really? As I stated on another thread, we, as a community, have almost no real value as consumer's. The last of us 2, the last guess joining this party, will sell millions of copies, as the first installment on th series did, and of all that money, how much will come from blind or accessibility interested users? 1000 dollars around the world? 5000, maybe? The problem we have as blind gamers is exactly the oposite: nobody has comercial interesd on us, we are not the target.Well, yeah. They want to control it because it can be used legally to deny competing engines access to the marketplace. Of course they never cared about accessibility in the first place, accessibility is just a means to an end - now that the issues are growing more visible and people are more vocal about it, corporations are adapting to accommodate it. But this is also exactly the reason why I'm cautious, because when they are able to check off the "we're accessible" checkmarks, they're able to gain market control while neglecting disabled people, and poor accessibility implementation can then be shifted to individual developers again. All while they're the ones with the most technical resources to actually build (when we have to just randomly assemble shit on an internet forum over 15 years)... When the abstract, performative label of "my game is accessible" is pushed out and the market believes it, it doesn't matter at all whether or not disabled people can actually play it, it can still take advantage of that appearance of blind accessibility for market advantage.What's that advantage? Morality points for one (which we've seen a lot of exploitation of), but more importantly, taking advantage of progression of disability law to have a large stake in disability in their product before laws are passed, to eliminate competition, especially competition that has little access to specific accessibility development resources (such as Godot). It's a great story for the tech press and a good sell. That's all that matters. @5A big part of making lasting change is knowing when to be diplomatic in order to get the desired outcome, or when to delegate that part to someone more suited. It sometimes feels disgusting, like giving in or being dishonest with your self, but no one ever said it would be easy, especially when working with humans in a society that values emotions over logic, and especially in a morally divisive field like disability.Diplomacy has not earned anyone better accessibility and this can clearly be seen by the lack of faith in other members in corporations to even cover the basic needs of accessibility. Anyways, I don't really need to work with them because I can build plug-ins that work with their software; I need to focus on targeting developers instead and demonstrating the ease-of-use and power that we plan on packing into Max. I could see it potentially developing into a hostile development competition where they try to lock out Max compatibility but I think this would reflect pretty poorly on the company that attempts to pull this shit. We need to pilot disability as a weapon, not as a moral position.@6Yeah, sorry, no one cares enough about the blind consumers to take control of gaming accessibility. I would love it if the big corporations were trying to take control of blind accessible gaming. It would be amazing. It would mean that we mattered and yeah, maybe they'd "win" this imaginary battle but hey, we'd get a hell of a lot of good games out of it. Also if we did matter and they took control, they'd have to do a good job or we'd just not buy them--it wouldn't be like screen readers where the law says, there'd be market incentive to not suck at it.We don't want corporations to own accessibility - we've already seen what happens when they dominate an accessibility market like Apple (deliberately invests a ton into a one-solution accessibility to try to suffocate competition for disabled choice of phone) or something like windows forms applications which were deprecated over time and the accessibility embedded into them lost. Furthermore, if they own accessibility they control how you interact with software, far more than a person without the need for accessibility tools.The nice thing about Max is that we don't need to work with the corporations. We just need to make it a plug-in that works with these engines that is as smooth as possible for end users. Creating a popular plugin that a lot of people use that is compatible with the general max environment allows max to work around this sort of problem (similar to how using a popular open source library for parsing JSON files can be used in a similar way, but instead of just working a specific function, Max can work with multiple other frontends) URL:
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib @4However, to be clear, I feel really confused by sentences like: the mainstream game industry wants to take control of the accessibility gaming. Really? As I stated on another thread, we, as a community, have almost no real value as consumer's. The last of us 2, the last guess joining this party, will sell millions of copies, as the first installment on th series did, and of all that money, how much will come from blind or accessibility interested users? 1000 dollars around the world? 5000, maybe? The problem we have as blind gamers is exactly the oposite: nobody has comercial interesd on us, we are not the target.Well, yeah. They want to control it because it can be used legally to deny competing engines access to the marketplace. Of course they never cared about accessibility in the first place, accessibility is just a means to an end - now that the issues are growing more visible and people are more vocal about it, corporations are adapting to accommodate it. But this is also exactly the reason why I'm cautious, because when they are able to check off the "we're accessible" checkmarks, they're able to gain market control while neglecting disabled people, and poor accessibility implementation can then be shifted to individual developers again. When the abstract, performative label of "my game is accessible" is pushed out and the market believes it, it doesn't matter at all whether or not disabled people can actually play it, it can still take advantage of that appearance of blind accessibility for market advantage.What's that advantage? Morality points for one (which we've seen a lot of exploitation of), but more importantly, taking advantage of progression of disability law to have a large stake in disability in their product before laws are passed, to eliminate competition, especially competition that has little access to specific accessibility development resources (such as Godot). It's a great story for the tech press and a good sell. That's all that matters. @5A big part of making lasting change is knowing when to be diplomatic in order to get the desired outcome, or when to delegate that part to someone more suited. It sometimes feels disgusting, like giving in or being dishonest with your self, but no one ever said it would be easy, especially when working with humans in a society that values emotions over logic, and especially in a morally divisive field like disability.Diplomacy has not earned anyone better accessibility and this can clearly be seen by the lack of faith in other members in corporations to even cover the basic needs of accessibility. Anyways, I don't really need to work with them because I can build plug-ins that work with their software; I need to focus on targeting developers instead and demonstrating the ease-of-use and power that we plan on packing into Max. I could see it potentially developing into a hostile development competition where they try to lock out Max compatibility but I think this would reflect pretty poorly on the company that attempts to pull this shit. We need to pilot disability as a weapon, not as a moral position.@6Yeah, sorry, no one cares enough about the blind consumers to take control of gaming accessibility. I would love it if the big corporations were trying to take control of blind accessible gaming. It would be amazing. It would mean that we mattered and yeah, maybe they'd "win" this imaginary battle but hey, we'd get a hell of a lot of good games out of it. Also if we did matter and they took control, they'd have to do a good job or we'd just not buy them--it wouldn't be like screen readers where the law says, there'd be market incentive to not suck at it.We don't want corporations to own accessibility - we've already seen what happens when they dominate an accessibility market like Apple (deliberately invests a ton into a one-solution accessibility to try to suffocate competition for disabled choice of phone) or something like windows forms applications which were deprecated over time and the accessibility embedded into them lost. Furthermore, if they own accessibility they control how you interact with software, far more than a person without the need for accessibility tools.The nice thing about Max is that we don't need to work with the corporations. We just need to make it a plug-in that works with these engines that is as smooth as possible for end users. Creating a popular plugin that a lot of people use that is compatible with the general max environment allows max to work around this sort of problem (similar to how using a popular open source library for parsing JSON files can be used in a similar way, but instead of just working a specific function, Max can work with multiple other frontends) URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/536469/#p536469 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib @4However, to be clear, I feel really confused by sentences like: the mainstream game industry wants to take control of the accessibility gaming. Really? As I stated on another thread, we, as a community, have almost no real value as consumer's. The last of us 2, the last guess joining this party, will sell millions of copies, as the first installment on th series did, and of all that money, how much will come from blind or accessibility interested users? 1000 dollars around the world? 5000, maybe? The problem we have as blind gamers is exactly the oposite: nobody has comercial interesd on us, we are not the target.Well, yeah. They want to control it because it can be used legally to deny competing engines access to the marketplace. Of course they never cared about accessibility in the first place, accessibility is just a means to an end - now that the issues are growing more visible and people are more vocal about it, corporations are adapting to accommodate it. But this is also exactly the reason why I'm cautious, because when they are able to check off the "we're accessible" checkmarks, they're able to gain market control while neglecting disabled people, and poor accessibility implementation can then be shifted to individual developers again.@5A big part of making lasting change is knowing when to be diplomatic in order to get the desired outcome, or when to delegate that part to someone more suited. It sometimes feels disgusting, like giving in or being dishonest with your self, but no one ever said it would be easy, especially when working with humans in a society that values emotions over logic, and especially in a morally divisive field like disability.Diplomacy has not earned anyone better accessibility and this can clearly be seen by the lack of faith in other members in corporations to even cover the basic needs of accessibility. Anyways, I don't really need to work with them because I can build plug-ins that work with their software; I need to focus on targeting developers instead and demonstrating the ease-of-use and power that we plan on packing into Max. I could see it potentially developing into a hostile development competition where they try to lock out Max compatibility but I think this would reflect pretty poorly on the company that attempts to pull this shit. We need to pilot disability as a weapon, not as a moral position.@6Yeah, sorry, no one cares enough about the blind consumers to take control of gaming accessibility. I would love it if the big corporations were trying to take control of blind accessible gaming. It would be amazing. It would mean that we mattered and yeah, maybe they'd "win" this imaginary battle but hey, we'd get a hell of a lot of good games out of it. Also if we did matter and they took control, they'd have to do a good job or we'd just not buy them--it wouldn't be like screen readers where the law says, there'd be market incentive to not suck at it.We don't want corporations to own accessibility - we've already seen what happens when they dominate an accessibility market like Apple (deliberately invests a ton into a one-solution accessibility to try to suffocate competition for disabled choice of phone) or something like windows forms applications which were deprecated over time and the accessibility embedded into them lost. Furthermore, if they own accessibility they control how you interact with software, far more than a person without the need for accessibility tools.The nice thing about Max is that we don't need to work with the corporations. We just need to make it a plug-in that works with these engines that is as smooth as possible for end users. Creating a popular plugin that a lot of people use that is compatible with the general max environment allows max to work around this sort of problem (similar to how using a popular open source library for parsing JSON files can be used in a similar way, but instead of just working a specific function, Max can work with multiple other frontends) URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/536469/#p536469 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib Yeah, sorry, no one cares enough about the blind consumers to take control of gaming accessibility. I would love it if the big corporations were trying to take control of blind accessible gaming. It would be amazing. It would mean that we mattered and yeah, maybe they'd "win" this imaginary battle but hey, we'd get a hell of a lot of good games out of it. Also if we did matter and they took control, they'd have to do a good job or we'd just not buy them--it wouldn't be like screen readers where the law says, there'd be market incentive to not suck at it. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/536407/#p536407 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib I won't get into that debate, mostly because I can't speak on it with any sort of authority, but I do strongly believe that avoiding any kind of rhetoric in the accompanying media/documentation for the engine on/near to launch is going to be vitally important to it's long term success.Harness those feelings to drive you to continue working on the project, and know that I'm not dismissing them, but wide adoption of this great set of tools is going to be hampered by that kind of strong, unpopular, no pulled punches opinion.A big part of making lasting change is knowing when to be diplomatic in order to get the desired outcome, or when to delegate that part to someone more suited. It sometimes feels disgusting, like giving in or being dishonest with your self, but no one ever said it would be easy, especially when working with humans in a society that values emotions over logic, and especially in a morally divisive field like disability. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/536388/#p536388 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib I won't get into that debate, mostly because I can't speak on it with any sort of authority, but I do strongly believe that avoiding any kind of rhetoric in the accompanying media/documentation for the engine on/near to launch is going to be vitally important to it's long term success.Harness those feelings to drive you to work on the project, and know that I'm not dismissing them, but wide adoption of this great set of tools is going to be hampered by that kind of strong, unpopular, no pulled punches opinion.A big part of making lasting change is knowing when to be diplomatic in order to get the desired outcome, or when to delegate that part to someone more suited. It sometimes feels disgusting, like giving in or being dishonest with your self, but no one ever said it would be easy, especially when working with humans in a society that values emotions over logic, and especially in a morally divisive field like disability. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/536388/#p536388 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib I won't get into that debate, mostly because I can't speak on it with any sort of authority, but I do strongly believe that avoiding any kind of rhetoric in the accompanying media/documentation for the engine on/near to launch is going to be vitally important to it's long term success.Harness those feelings to drive you to work on the project, and know that I'm not dismissing them, but wide adoption of this great set of tools is going to be hampered by that kind of strong, unpopular, no pulled punches opinion.A big part of making lasting change is knowing when to be diplomatic in order to get the desired outcome, or when to delegate that part to someone more suited. It sometimes feels disgusting, like giving in or being dishonest with your self, but no one ever said it would be easy, especially when working with humans in a society that values emotions over logic, and in a morally decisive field like disability. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/536388/#p536388 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib First of all, all my support and thanks for your project. Projects like this can help the blind gamers community a lot: new games, more developers...However, to be clear, I feel really confused by sentences like: the mainstream game industry wants to take control of the accessibility gaming. Really? As I stated on another thread, we, as a community, have almost no real value as consumer's. The last of us 2, the last guess joining this party, will sell millions of copies, as the first installment on th series did, and of all that money, how much will come from blind or accessibility interested users? 1000 dollars around the world? 5000, maybe? The problem we have as blind gamers is exactly the oposite: nobody has comercial interesd on us, we are not the target.So, in my case, each and every step towards a more accessible game experience is more than welcome. When a mainstream developer tries to make a game more visually impaired friendly, far from thinking: oh, no, they want to take control of our community! I'd say: thanks and we are here to help if necessary, good job!Just my thoughts URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/536377/#p536377 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib I am also interested to see where this project goes. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/536336/#p536336 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib
Re: Just wanted to provide an update on Max-Lib Sounds like the final products functionality will be enhanced by the changes. Hard to complain about that... Take all the time you need.Thanks for the incremental updates! URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/535917/#p535917 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
