Notices by Talon (talon@dragonscave.space), page 7

Been working on and off, very slowly, on a game engine that should do most of the things I want an engine to do. One of the tips I've heard and can definitely echo is to work on a game first, and engine second. Make the engine work with your game, not the other way around.
For the longest time I've been working in a relatively OOP style because that's how I learned, and that's how things made sense. But it always ended in a mess. Whenever I wanted to reuse code I had to untangle it and rewrite stuff or copy a bunch of other stuff I would never need. So i decided I'm going to try an entity component system.
And like I dunno... Over the last year my brain slowly started rewiring my thought patterns and now it makes sense to me intuitively. You don't even have to be an ECS purist to get massive benefits out of it. Even just going in an ECS direction helps a lot.
While making a game, you will still end up depending on other entities and systems and what not. Games are complex. You can't stop dependencies. But the difference is that if you do want to break off a bit of code and reuse it, it is much more obvious where to do that.
Like while developing this thing, I switched the project I'm developing it for (or maybe with?) several times. The game changed. But I was always able to drag most of the code with me into this new game idea and keep iterating on it. And I'm fairly sure this would have been a lot harder if there wasn't this very compartmentalizable idea of components and systems.
Again I'm not an ECS or die kind of person. Especially if you're working alone, it's preferable to take some shortcuts. But even if you only loosely structure your projects in this way things seem much nicer to just... I don't know... find your way around? Reuse?
Just like any paradigm, you have to apply it in a way that makes sense to you. I've taken shortcuts. It's not pure ECS either. But even so things make sense, things fit together nicely, and there's no mess that immediately makes me want to tear the whole thing down. Which is more or less the case with literally all of my other games. Which is also why I never update them. Always learning, always growing, it's a pretty nice feeling sometimes.

Maybe this will eventually lead me to actually release a new game. That'd be nice wouldn't it? I'd like that. Unless that Godot accessibility branch gets merged first. Then I'll spend another little while learning a new thing.

I don't even want to make an engine if I'm completely honest. I want to make games. I've wasted so much time on this. But accessibility concerns... it's always the same story, really.

Like for example tools to wysiwyg a world. You could just drop into an engine with an editor and just do that. And make some objects. And attach scripts and what not. You even have other tools to help like modelling software and whatever else. None of that's accessible. So we kinda reinvent the wheel very terribly to make this work. And a lot of the time this wheel gets reinvented per game. Most of the time we don't even wysiwyg a world at all. It's all a big mess.

For what it's worth, so basically not much, I think renaming "unlisted" to "quiet public" was not a good idea.

It's a concept that needs explanation, no matter what you call it.
Thus, I propose we call them: Shout, Speak, Whisper and Conversation. That sounds fun!

Alternatively: ROAR!, Rawr, rar and rur

My cat interjected. She thinks it should be MEEEOOOWWW!, Meow, mew and rrr?

Sometimes I come across really cool apps on Mac. Like SoundPaste. Press a button, record system audio, mic, or both, press again and it gets saved and copied to clipboard immediately. Then I think about apps like Audio Hijack and like... yeah Apple and Mac have their issues but this is just really cool. As someone who works with audio a lot, there's just so much cool stuff here. And it's accessible too. I dunno.

For those that wonder what I think about Ableton Live, I've been posting tracks I've made with it for a while. The hamster dance, the one that just says hey <3, wubwub.wav, and the D&B were Ableton Live.
And here's my very first Ableton Live project. Made that on the day I got access to the beta.

As for what I think, I like it. There's still quite a lot to improve, for example no automation accessibility being the big one for me, weird focus issues with third party plugins, but I like the workflow so I'm quite optimistic and hopeful.

You know what? I'm not gonna post all emotionally about JAWS and AI and whatever. It won't do any good anyway. My stance on the matter is probably well known by this point, dangers, caution, ethical concerns, you know the drill. I'll do what I can to make sure people make informed decisions, but all this stuff is so tiring. Just so, so tiring. And I am hearing more crypto crap again lately. Tears. Many tears. Have an emotional post about tech as a whole, instead. I don't know anymore. I feel like I need a tech vacation for a while. Far away from all of this stuff. Let's go do something fun instead. Who's with me?

I tried to make some D&B.

Hey <3

@aral It's all so disappointing and it's hard to really be excited about any of this stuff. There are so many random accessibility quirks and issues that for a lot of us, simply switching to something else isn't a great option, no matter how much I want to. It really, really sucks being caught in the middle of all this.

Not gonna lie this iOS PWA thing is pissing me right the hell off. So now I have to choose between not being able to use PWA's or not being able to type properly. This is what it's like as a disabled smartphone user in 2024. I hate it. So much. Burn it all down.

Also if you're a blind android user and you're about to jump into my mentions saying something like oh it's not that bad, or just use BSI, or just use voice input, please just... don't. If there's something I'm missing then please by all means do tell me, but if it's just one of the above then trust me I've already considered it.

This shit is so disheartening. Come on EU please! So now we neither get third party app stores, nor get PWA's. This is literally just making all of our lives worse. How did they not see this coming?

The person doing the train announcements just picked up the mic, sighed, then put it back down. You know what, I feel that. I am so with you.

Yo. If you use Type ahead screen reader, especially with GPT 4, be mindful of what you send it. I really don’t know if I like the idea in general, but seriously, you might not want to get too careless with this stuff. Otherwise I’m sure I’m not the only one who’ll probably think twice about what we say to you in chats or whatever. Or, you know, your credit card details end up in GPT 5 or something. Just some food for thought. While I’m at it… Can we also please stop AI-ing all the things?

We tested our product with this AI screen reader and have found it sufficient. It is now accessible. We didn’t have to do a thing!
- tech companies in the future, probably.