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.
@8
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.
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 data in ways that make sense for them, eliminating the sighted-to-blind hierarchy in audio game development. Even if Max is only used by a few sighted games, those games would support a level of blind accessibility otherwise not achievable, and blind people directly develop the UI from it.
If you're interested you should rebutt this essay here: https://labadore64.com/2020/03/04/The-UI-Hierarchy.html it's about this subject extensively and the main motivation behind why I take these paranoias so seriously. I actually would really appreciate serious criticism on this essay because I intend on elaborating more on its details in the future.
Legally, there actually was a law that was put into effect last year that controls accessible gaming communications. Wonder why discord suddenly became a little accessible? That's why. Accessibility laws again aren't pursued for you but rather for private corporate interest. What happens is one company will develop integrated accessibility and try to push for more stringent accessibility laws, which eliminates competition. This is not a major investment but it is relatively effective because even if the cases are not legally pursued they put a lot of pressure on mid-sized software developers, especially smaller game engines competing with the big boys. The marketing also accelerates this trend.
Max isn't held by a patent and is implemented by the developer, which is how it circumnavigates the corporate influence. The main way that corporations would prevent usage would be by writing code that detects and prevents Max from being used in certain engines. Again, if you had a free library that had code that let you do [x] function it wouldn't matter if a corporation wanted to use their version of it, because I could just use the free library instead, this is the real power of open source code.
So, genuinely, what is the value? Why wasn't it better to have just made audiogame unity or something?
Unlike an audiogame unity, the modules would be developed by blind people and would allow for multiple ways to play games (multiple accessibility preferences) that could be contributed by the community instead of relying on an end developer. Also, Unity is a walled garden for game developers and they are subject to its choices. Unity is not royalty free so having a free highly accessible game engine component allows for devs who don't want to be bound by Unity's contracts an option.
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 tools for ourselves, who is willing to just sweep the fact that this is actually an incredibly difficult never-ending battle under the rug.
Bro I'm literally trying to help you develop that tool lol. We just want to have the backend running before we release it so that we don't get a tangled mess of a project. We're trying to build a game engine thing that lets you swap out its parts with something else that is better for your needs. That's literally all Max is. Max is open source, blind people can build their own versions. I just want to set something up first so that there is a consistent core engine that has all these pieces working together so sighted and blind development for Max can occur seamlessly.
Also, this site has a whole section literally dedicated to blind people learning how to play sighted games? I must have been mistaken in thinking it was a source of pride for blind gamers to overcome those challenges but wishing it didn't have to be so hard so everyone could enjoy the game. I get that full accessibility is likely impossible but this is a really bad take. Yeah, it would be nice to have tools but you have to build smarter, not harder.
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