ontheotherside

@ontheotherside@mastodon.social

Just a former #blind redditor who decided to migrate. I can't promise a lot right now, but if you let me figure things out, the payoff may or may not be huge. Anyways, glad for a new corner that I can call my own.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

TheQuinbox, to random

Every few months or so I want to make games. Then I look into existing audio game tools, am reminded why I never bother, and the cycle repeats. Most audio game tech is 20-30 years out of date, which is just sad. I can probably count the number of audio games that have proper math/physics on one hand. A lot of this is because these games are primarily made by high school students (like yours truly). In my case, I have enough time after school and procrastinating on homework to sit down and work on a game. But there's no money in it so that's not sustainable, and because there are so few tools, you have to build yourself an entire game engine before you can even get started. For example, I'm presently wrapping Bass to make it much more friendly for audio game dev, but every minute I spend doing that is a minute not spent on the game. Don't get me wrong, BGT did a lot of damage to the audio gaming community, by teaching people all sorts of bad programming habits and other such issues. But...it worked! It let people just have to write the game. Of course it didn't scale very well (STW having to literally rewrite BGT to overcome its shortcomings is definite proof of that), but I find myself wondering if, without BGT, we'd have some of the amazing games we do today, like Manamon or STW. I very gently fall on the side of no, just because I've talked to one or two of the developers of massive and popular BGT games and all of them have said that it was the ease that attracted them to BGT, and gamedev as a whole. Obviously BGT was limited and had problems, but I honestly think that, if done right, an audio game creation engine (like BGT) would actually be really good for the realm of audio games.

ontheotherside,

@TheQuinbox Another point worth bringing up is that even if a lot of the younger developers in the community without the necessary knowledge to create a minimal engine wanted to use existing tools, most of the modern game engines aren't really practical to use without sight. A lot of audiogames are stuck reinventing the wheel since we sadly can't really use existing tools in the way other devs can. (hence me working on a framework forever and never spending real time on games)

talon, to random
@talon@dragonscave.space avatar

Yo so Stable Audio is absolutely terrible. I'm not even just saying that because I'm a musician and opposed to AI. I've tried about 10 prompts by now, and not a single one turned out even anywhere close to decent. It's not even that there are small mistakes. They're big. Unlistenable mistakes. Where did the promo audio come from? How did they do it?

ontheotherside,

@talon My entire experience up to this point with the various audio based (specifically music generating) models has been nothing but cherry-picked demos and benchmarks to suggest that they perform better than they realistically do, ,but people are very quick to throw services together to charge for generations.

superblindman, to random
@superblindman@peoplemaking.games avatar

I forgot to say it this morning, but happy official MK1 launch day everyone!!! I hope those who started today are having a blast.

ontheotherside,

@superblindman I'm been having a complete blast! It's been so long since I've played an MK title, and I have a lot to learn. The accessibility features are a dream come true. If I didn't spend so much time in the game today I would have likely spammed you with appreciation posts. Thanks again for all of the hard work!

TheQuinbox, to random

We really need a screen reader abstraction library that doesn’t suck. Universal speech is okay, but getting it to compile is extremely difficult, and it also doesn’t support a lot of screen readers last I looked. Tolk seems unmaintained, uses a really archaic build system, and output only speaks like half of the time. AO2 is probably the best one, but it’s Python only. I just wish I knew enough Rust to actually prototype something, because it could definitely be done so much better.

ontheotherside,

@TheQuinbox For what it's worth, I haven't had nearly as many issues using Tolk as I've had with AO2. I guess it all depends on what you're looking for though since being cross platform wasn't a requirement for me.

TheQuinbox, to random

That’s a new one. What a way to totally take down my screen reader. RuntimeError: dictionary changed size during iteration

ontheotherside,

@TheQuinbox My favorite error!

mattblaze, (edited ) to random
@mattblaze@federate.social avatar

This may be obvious, but I recently started routinely adding "-youtube" to google searches. This eliminates most pages with links to garbage YouTube-monetized videos that try to attract people looking for basic instructions on how to do simple things. Greatly improves the quality of search results.

ontheotherside,

@mattblaze It feels like I'm seeing these videos pop up more and more as time goes on. I wonder if a tool/solution could be made to filter them out on request.

TheQuinbox, to random

Thinking about doing a live coding session on TeamTalk either tonight or tomorrow. Not sure what I'd code yet, but I think it'd be fun. Play with Copilot and live share, code some cool shit, talk to some cool people. Thoughts?

ontheotherside,

@TheQuinbox I'm down.

TheQuinbox, to random

Have we found a good way to represent shapes aside from quadrilaterals in audio? I'm asking because I need to be able to represent an equilateral triangle and circles in pure audio for a project idea I just had.

ontheotherside,

@TheQuinbox I can't really think of any games/projects that have found a way to do this successfully, but some have definitely tried. The most intuitive solutions I've seen revolve around tone sonification. (Like the Sonic game that used tones to try and communicate the angles of the slopes that he ran on)

TheQuinbox, to random

Stupid idea of the day: A multi-player web game/simulation of the amusement park ride bumpercars. multiple people can get into cars, and fly around trying to smash into each other, with cool 3d audio, an offline mode, customizable time limits, etc. I'm in no position to code this at the moment, considering that I'm sick and also know absolutely nothing about the physics and math required to code this, but does anyone else think this would actually be kind of cool?

ontheotherside,

@TheQuinbox This actually sounds pretty neat! I wouldn't mind working on something quick and dirty, but the networking part/keeping everyone updated with the simmulation is the only aspect I'm not certain about. (assuming that simple boxes colliding and bouncing off of each other was all we wanted)

ontheotherside,

@TheQuinbox My web dev experience is pretty sad, but I feel like this could be a fun project to attempt to learn. Otherwise I'd mostly be helpful in Python if you were interested in contributions.

TheQuinbox, to random

Every time I play Cyclepath or Dark Defender I want to make web games, because of how powerful the web is. Then I start playing with NPM and looking at all the possible different packages and the like 5000 different build tools and no longer want to do that.

ontheotherside,

@TheQuinbox Tell me about it. Maybe someday…

Kaliah, to random

Sometimes, I wish certain aspects of myself were easier to express. I wish I could more openly talk about them. I wish more people were accepting of such things. I've accepted who I am for the most part, now the hard thing is figuring out the complexity of who will accept which parts of me. I'm constantly worrying that someone won't accept this or that about me. And that kind of worry is very difficult.

ontheotherside,

@Kaliah I don’t think I would have ever been able to articulate this any better. Constantly worrying about who will accept certain parts of you is extremely draining, but here’s to learning to unapologetically be ourselves.

TheQuinbox, to random

As much as I shit on going to an in-person high school, more specifically a public, mainstream one, it has really improved my confidence traveling. I just successfully made it to a class meeting in a room that I had no idea where it was with no guide or assistance, and also was fully able to talk and socialize with people while doing so, and not get overwhelmed. I still didn't feel super confident, but I made it.

ontheotherside,

@TheQuinbox This isn't a small feat by any means. I wish I had a higher level of confidence while traveling. Spending more time in mainstream environments could have helped me a lot with this. :( Anyways nice work.

ZBennoui, to random

I have begun the process of creating a screen reader optimized voice for Piper based on my own recordings. This is not the final version by any means, there is still a lot of work to be done, but I wanted to share this early version for people to test.
Please give me feedback on aspects such as the overall quality and pronunciation, keeping in mind that screen reader support for Piper is still relatively early in development, and there are bound to be problems.
I've attached an example below. Let me know what you think.
Model Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vDaXZ75FIMl2PGf-Y6mDiAg0Fvph7wUC/view?usp=share_link

ontheotherside,

@ZBennoui Hi. The voice that you've been training sounds great! I haven't heard many voices outside of the ones suggested to be downloaded along with the add on, so I'm glad to see that self trained voices are turning out nicely! As someone with experience locally trainning non Piper voices, did you manage to train this one locally? If so, I could potentially become annoying.

ontheotherside,

@ZBennoui Is there a tool or solution that you use to create your datasets for your Piper voices before I make my own?

pitermach, to random

So, the hype got the best of me and I bought the game early to access the beta, which an hour later I can now say was absolutely worth it. Here’s some findings if you’re curious what we get:

  • There is a legit screen reader! On first launch you’re asked whether you want it enabled, with the focus starting on the disable option so you have to go down and confirm to use it. It uses its own voice, one of the Festival ones I think which sounds very robotic but can get used to. I just wish it had a speed control, because the default speaking speed is rather slow which can be a bit tiresome when reading something like the move list. But that nicely leads me to the fact that yes, it reads almost everything including all option menus, character select and the aforementioned move lists. There’s a couple of things that aren’t read, like the selecting the tower’s difficulty and the menus after a fight ends but compared to MK 11 this is absolutely amazing and hopefully the missing sections will be spoken in a future update.
  • In addition to the screen reader, we also got audio descriptions for cinematics! That includes when characters perform a fatal blow or fatality. Unlike the screen reader, these are human narrated with a very enthusiastic British lady who sounds like she’s really into the action which is just awesome. I attached a short gameplay clip of this in action. This very strongly implies the story mode in the game will be described as well to me, which if it’s true would be just amazing.
  • Finally, like the video which we saw a while ago implied we got a ton of extra audio queues. Character distance, blocking and ducking queues, attack type, special and health meters, and an edge of arena indicator can all be turned on with individual volume sliders for each. All of these sounds are very subtle but distinct from each other. In addition the accessibility menu offers individual sliders for footsteps, regular and special attacks, vocalizations and ambiance. There are also audio presets which let you quickly set up the game for different levels of audio queue assistance.

So yeah, if you are debating on getting this game, it’s absolutely worth the wait. There are some minor improvements that could be made, but without a doubt this is a massive win. Now for the audio described gameplay clip!

Gameplay clip of me very badly losing to the AI in Mortal Kombat 1, which performs a fatal blow on me. As the attack plays out a female voice narrates: “Jax punches his victim skyward, he brings them down in a suplex, shattering their lumbar. Liu Kang rapidly kicks the victim into the air, shattering their ribs. He blasts them into the floor with a massive beam of fire.”

ontheotherside,

@pitermach I didn't think it was possible for me to be more excited than I already am! Being able to access the moves list is enough for me alone.

TheQuinbox, to random

While digging through files on HumanWare's website, I managed to find some old video tutorials of the Mountbatten (a quite interesting brailler-like product). Since it's HumanWare, and they're notorious for making old files no longer available (original BrailleNote Touch changelogs much?) I've archived them here: http://storage.braillescreen.net/files/mountbatten.zip

ontheotherside,

@TheQuinbox I actually used one of these a single time when I was a kid if it's what I think it is. Someone somewhere thought it would be helpful since I was learning braille after losing my vision. Apparently I wasn't very good with it because I constantly got it to jam and emit the scariest possible sounds. (scary to a ten year old anyways)

TheQuinbox, (edited ) to random

A very interesting conversation in a Clubhouse room got me wondering about this: if you’re blind and had the ability to get some vision restored, would you do it? Or would you only do it if you could get full (or almost full) vision back? I’ve seen loads of people falling on both sides of this, and am endlessly curious now.

Feel free to boost for reach.

ontheotherside,

@TheQuinbox Even if I had the opportunity to restore my vision slightly, I’d still take it as long as it was enough for me to use in my daily life. Even now with so much technology at our disposal, blindness is still far too inconvenient in my opinion, and I’d be satisfy with just enough to aid in navigation.

TheQuinbox, (edited ) to random

Well, um. I finally got my school schedule. As a screenshot. Taken on an iPhone. With no alt text.
To make this even worse, they told me I got it early because I'm blind. But... couldn't be bothered to include alt text?

ontheotherside,

@TheQuinbox Who seriously does that? Maybe it's worth complaining about.

stefan, (edited ) to random
@stefan@stefanbohacek.online avatar

Question for folks, what kind of image descriptions do you prefer?

ontheotherside,

@stefan I can only speak for myself as a blind user, but my favorite image descriptions that I’ve seen so far are the ones that manage to explain the content of the image in detail while offering context specific to the poster’s tonal intentions. (humor or whit for a meme for example) regardless, I’m just glad to have the chance to actually interact with content.

TheQuinbox, to random

I've just released an update to my IPLocate tool. You can now pass an IP address on the command line, completely avoiding the input box. Also, if you don't supply an IP address, it'll locate your computer's public IP. https://quinbox.xyz/files/IPLocate.exe

ontheotherside,

@TheQuinbox Woah this is actually pretty useful for me. Thanks.

vascorsd, to random
@vascorsd@mastodon.social avatar

You heard it here first: the rise of extremely personalized AI generated porn and the extreme rabbit hole it leads into will fuck up humanity to a level of no return.

ontheotherside,

@vascorsd I agree with you, but I also think that there are scarier ways that AI will fuck us first. (like integrating it into law enforcement)

ontheotherside,

@x0 I love Whisper for this. Turns these videos into nice transcripts that I can search through.

TheQuinbox, to random

I wonder if there's any kind of notable correlation between people who lost their vision as opposed to being born blind, and good spatial awareness. I lost my vision quite young, but I still had it long enough to grow up like a sighted todler, and I was born with full vision. And my spatial awareness is quite good. But then again, I've known people born blind with good spatial awareness, so who knows.

ontheotherside,

@TheQuinbox Perhaps there is somewhat of a correlation. I lost my vision several years into childhood, and my spacial awareness was pretty good for quite a while. It has degraded over time though, and I can’t really speak to why that is.

TheQuinbox, to random

Extremely random question for those that know the history of braille/Nemeth much further than I do: what was the rationale behind dropped numbers? So we could have letters in equations without a letter indicator?

ontheotherside,

@TheQuinbox Definitely not an expert, but that's how I've understood it at least. I always thought it was to avoid having to throw around indicators while working with equations.

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