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Yeah, it seems like an oversight for their marketing department really, but once you get big enough, any minority group gets less and less relevant to bother catering to. And thanks for checking on the banner ad.
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Apr 2, 2022 08:51
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Thanks for the detailed thread! Was wondering if I could get some feedback on a gif (spoilered below) I posted in the making games megathread and someone pointed out that the enemies I have in my game flash on hit and that might be a little too much. You mentioned it was probably fine but bigger enemies might be worse. I've toned the flashing down a bit in the original (to once, down from three times) but I was wondering if this was still OK with bigger enemies. There's a flash whenever the enemy gets hit, bits of screenshake throughout, as well as a kind of spinning sparkle/shine type effect when the enemy charges its attacks. The player does this too occasionally but at a smaller scale. I'm hoping this is still OK and doesn't have cause any negative effects, especially if it's fullscreen on a big monitor I will likely end up adding options to turn off (or maybe add transparency?) to the spinning sparkly things.  here it is linked as well, just in case the embedded gif runs slower
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Apr 3, 2022 00:02
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goku i won't do what u tell me
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Okay so there was a single instance of that little gameplay loop where the frog took a hit with flashing, but where the screen did not shake. That single instance felt a lot more comfortable for me to look at. In general the game is completely safe, but every time the flash occurs simultaneously with the screen shaking, I get this little, I don't know....hard to describe...twitch...thing in my right eye, that feels like I'm getting my focus jolted away a bit. Breaks the flow for me. Kinda like if you are driving and a bright light is shining through holes in an obstacle. Its not rapid enough to actually mess with me (like driving through a forest heading towards a sunrise can be) but it is distracting me enough to keep catching my attention and then not being there long enough to have anywhere to put said attention. Gameplay loop is fine. If you are going to add a sensitivity option, I recommend adding a toggle where you remove the screenshaking from the player's attacks hitting home. Screenshake in general is fine, like when the frog does his slam attack on the ground. Its specifically the flash combined with the shaking that has any issue at all.
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Apr 3, 2022 07:00
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Thanks a bunch for the feedback! I already have options for screenshake and the hitpause, good to know the flashing isn't an issue (but I still plan on letting players turn that off too if they want)
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Apr 3, 2022 10:52
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The banner is no longer there, it should be safe to look at Steam again.
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Apr 5, 2022 20:54
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Excellent! Thanks for the heads up. I was pretty sure that it should be gone by now, but I wasn't willing to chance the 2-4 hour hangover.
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Apr 6, 2022 18:45
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SerthVarnee posted:Kinda like if you are driving and a bright light is shining through holes in an obstacle. Its not rapid enough to actually mess with me (like driving through a forest heading towards a sunrise can be) but it is distracting me enough to keep catching my attention and then not being there long enough to have anywhere to put said attention. I've thought of asking you about that. Sometimes on sunny days on a road through the forest the constant flicker between light and shade messes with me a bit, and I don't even have epilepsy.
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Apr 6, 2022 20:12
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Yeah that stuff is a pain in the rear end, but mostly I can deal with that by shielding the worst with a hand, doing the safety squint and then looking down at the floor. Obviously I ride the bus when doing that. I chose to not get a drivers license due to the wonderful mix of epilepsy and ADD.
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Apr 6, 2022 21:24
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So US based webdevelopers might be VERY interested in this bit of news: https://twitter.com/ianhamilton_/status/1511635807643316225 I suspect that a very very large number of webpages will be needing some dev work done.
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Apr 6, 2022 22:27
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I ended up having a very nice chat with Ian Hamilton where we talked about this thread and how to present the information stored here in a more professional manner. During our conversation he also went through some of earliest posts in this thread and set me straight on the story of Cyberpunk 2077 as well as the old Japanese cartoons. First up: he gave me a rundown of the rough guidelines for safe digital products:  Note that these guidelines are specifically tailored to prevent full blown seizures. Not the smaller micro seizures that I regularly run across. Those are the criteria that were arrived at following the Pokémon episode, based on exposure research using photo stimulators and EEG. It was an episode of Pokémon that had a full screen strobe effect between red and blue for when Pikachu hit a missile with a lightning attack. This is just an still image:  In the cartoon episode it's flashing 24 times per second for a full 5 seconds, starting out full screen then shrinking to how it is in the still. He did also have the video of said animation lying around, but I politely declined getting that, as I'm quite certain that would actually send me into a full blown seizure. The Cyberpunk 2077 thing was initially described to me as being the dev team finding a video showcase of what to absolutely not do and then going "that looks awesome, lets put that in the game as is". Quoting Ian Hamilton here: "This is what cyberpunk looks like. When you go into VR in the game you put these eye pieces on, and then flicker into life ending up with the screen fully white, then fades from white into the VR view  Someone mistakenly thought those were an exact replica of a device that does not kill people but is used to intentionally induce seizures in a controlled environment But this is what that device looks like  It's nothing like the device in cyberpunk But the myth spread There is a positive side to it all though A great deal of awareness was raised, not just with the Cyberpunk devs but across the industry So not only was it patched in cyberpunk, but if resulted in changes being made in quite a few other games too." Ubisoft were the first to actually take the dangers of epilepsy seriously in their game development. It was reactive, a boy in the UK had his first seizure from playing Raving Rabbids, his mother took it to the government and the industry was nearly regulated, instead Ubisoft and some others voluntarily took on their own internal testing requirements. Microsoft also do epilepsy seizure safety testing on their first party titles. Rockstar and 2K Games do not. And goddamn does it show. E: now with functioning images SerthVarnee fucked around with this message at 09:56 on Nov 18, 2022 |
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Apr 10, 2022 19:14
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SerthVarnee posted:Thanks again for helping me contact Penny Arcade McNally. Remember when I talked about this setting change being quite helpful? Turns out it also disables the ability to join other people on steam with their remote play together feature. No clue why, but after a lot of fiddling and trial & error (where each attempt got a separate test just to make sure we knew which change was the useful one) turning the option off and letting unnecessary animation play to their hearts' content again made it work just fine.
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Apr 15, 2022 13:27
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Okay so the second to last mission in EDF 5? not great very colors much flashy more words tomorrow when I can do them better. So many beams in so many different colors from so many angles. yeah. We made it through the mission but I took a couple for the team in that fight started to overheat suddenly in middle of the fight, which usually means we're on our way to an adventure with ambulances and hospitals managed to get rid of a sweater midfight and ended up just stopping dead in the middle of the battlefield a few times just to hold on to my eyeballs you know, kinda like a drunk has to hold on to the floor to lie down. SerthVarnee fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Apr 19, 2022 |
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Apr 19, 2022 20:14
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SerthVarnee posted:Okay so the second to last mission in EDF 5? wait, was that 15 minutes ago? Wow time flies/skips when you aren't feeling great. I'm gonna go lie down now.
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Apr 19, 2022 20:30
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Okay, back in action. So that didn't feel like your regular micro-seizure experience. Halfway through the mission I started to feel REALLY overheated, which is usually a sign of the ambulance times being near at hand. Got rid of a sweater and tried to keep my distance from the most extremely over the top light shows. The problem started a ways into the mission when you had to shoot some flying constructs that were orbiting around the main boss. Some of those circling things were shield generators as indicated by the orange/purple forcefield shimmering around the generators. Same shield generators provided a light green forcefield, with some fancy graphical detailing imbedded, around the massive boss hovering in the sky above the players. Shooting the shield generators made them pulse brightly once per shot. I quickly stopped using the shotgun. So far so irritating. Annoying flashing, but whatever. Then you got all the regular enemies firing bolts of different colored lights at you, depending on which enemy was shooting. Also irritating, but I'm very used to those, so no big deal. Then the orbiting constructs, which by the way are exclusive to that mission out of a pool of about 110 missions, starting lighting up the place with more energy bolts. Also fine-ish although its starting to get a bit much. And then the inner ring of constructs started firing off multi-second duration bright pink/purple beams at players that would splash to take up the whole screen. Not okay, especially not okay with all the other stuff going on, but honestly the pink/purple beams that completely blind you were a serious issue on their own. As the cherry on top of the suffering sandwhich, the inner ring also starts firing off wave patterns of bright blue/white energy bolts in the general direction of the players like its suddenly some kind of bullet-hell. In the end I was hurting, getting nauseous and generally not having a good time. By that point we were so close to winning it that I just did the best I could while taking sudden breaks in the middle of the firefight just to cover my eyeballs for a few seconds. So yeah we won mission and I instantly called it good for the evening because christ that wasn't fun. Went on to try and write something down here simply because I wasn't sure if I could remember all the details the day after and man was it a struggle just to get those first 4 lines of text down. 15 minutes later (or about 20 seconds in my head) I edited in a few more lines and realized I had been staring off into space for 15 minutes. So yeah, in general EDF 5 is a great game that can very occasionally have a few over the top elements. But beware the second to last mission, it is not meant for the sensitive eyes.
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Apr 20, 2022 06:10
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Got another one for you via a friend of mine. This one I will not be testing since it sounds absolutely horrible just from her description. Good Friend: so, regarding flashing stuff. In Lost ark when one go in Chaos Dungeons and such the likes. Fy fabula the flashes and blinking. I am not an epelectic but I see stars anyway isch Serth: good to know! I'll add it to the list Good Friend: Yeah deffo jesus .... My eyes hurt so bad Serth: I'll just refrain from looking at that myself then... Will note it down in a section called "reported by others, not confirmed myself" though Good Friend: Absolutely Ofc Serth: is it any specific dungeon, a specific dungeon type, biome, enemy or just all of the everything? Good Friend: It is called Chaos Dungeon and also in some of the higher tier of events when you have hit lvl 50 But not in the normal gaming world So yeah, beware the Lost Ark, it might try to show you its interpretation of that Indiana Jones scene.
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Apr 24, 2022 06:32
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cranky corvid posted:
I got a good example of the starting point of the lightning sliding scale of harmfulness courtesy of TooMuchAbstraction Harmful links are intentionally made unclickable, copy/paste them into to an address bar to see them. this one took about 15 minutes before the punch hit me and it only made a little lightheaded as well as making it hard to read longer texts on discord. Font size was too small for what my brain could still process at a acceptable rate. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/879412580098121739/967540157718859898/electricexplosion.mp4 This is the absolutely starting point of lightning effects and the damage they are able to inflict. If you make this longer lasting, more dominant on the screen or even brighter/rapid firing, then you will do serious harm to photosensitive people. Its one of the easiest accidental triggers to make, which is unfortunate since it looks very cool and is very much a favorite effect type among graphical artists . 50 minutes passed between TooMuchAbstraction responding to my feedback and uploading a new much safer version. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/879412580098121739/967792736944148490/electricexplosion2.mp4 So yeah, it can literally take less time to fix the issue than it takes me to recover from the issue in the first place. I'd say that's worth the discomfort I go through doing this testing. SerthVarnee fucked around with this message at 12:12 on Oct 30, 2022 |
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Apr 24, 2022 11:00
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Oh I'm just on a roll these days. I've been replaying Might & Magic 10 and there have been some fun stuff going on in that game. First up when the game boots up it flickers rapidly between black and grey about ten times before displaying the Ubisoft logo (super great PR right there). Next up, for some reason the shadows get messed up on my pc leaving dark elves looking a lot more like something that got booted out of a twilight movie for being too sparkly.  Yes, yes the sparkly effect moves around alot when the enemies do (which they do all the time until dead). Much much worse though, was when the enemy unit called Dark Wizard casts the spell Feeblemind on you. They do so with a very very uncomfortable looking spell effect. Even with the graphics for it working as intended its instantly uncomfortable for me. It makes a sudden sphere in front of your party, said sphere twists and distorts rapidly and man is that just not something I can look at without being instantly affected. Again not an actual seizure being induced, but definitely a micro seizure that will leave me spending the next 20 minutes to 4 hours recovering.   those were the two screencaps I managed to get of the Feeblemind spell. It goes on like that for 2-4 seconds. Instant nausea first time I got caught unaware by it.
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Apr 25, 2022 16:26
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Teketeketeketeke posted:What about Magic Eye stereograms and similar? So this is from back on page one, but I can now tell you that the Magic Eye stereograms that actually move? Those make me nauseous real goddamn quick. Harmful links are intentionally made unclickable, copy/paste them into to an address bar to see them. Such nausea, cannot recommend https://i.imgur.com/ghPk6n1.mp4 No I did not look at it long enough to figure out what it contained, so sorry for potentially dropping a nausea inducing rendition of goatse/loss on you. In case you are curious where I came across this one, look no further than the PYF Bad rear end Pictures thread. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3632393&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=260#post523312448 SerthVarnee fucked around with this message at 12:12 on Oct 30, 2022 |
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May 9, 2022 19:29
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It's a shark wiggling to swim, if you wondered. I had never considered a moving stereogram like that before, kind of neat, though they're always pretty basic so it doesn't really add a ton to the experience. Can't exactly get a ton of detail out of one of those things.
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May 11, 2022 04:23
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Oh that actually sounds pretty cool. Too bad it just isn't something I can handle looking at.
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May 11, 2022 05:39
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I learned something new (and lovely) today. Turns out that every time an epileptic has a seizure their brain gets BETTER AT HAVING SEIZURES. MOTHER loving BULLSHIT. Yesterday I learned that people with epilepsy have twice the unemployment rate compared to the normal people. And they have half the life expectancy compared to normal people. So the work I do with testing games might end up killing me. It's still worth it to me, but I sure as gently caress hope people are taking notes when I give them feedback.
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May 11, 2022 20:23
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SerthVarnee posted:So this is from back on page one, but I can now tell you that the Magic Eye stereograms that actually move? Those make me nauseous real goddamn quick. vortmax fucked around with this message at 00:45 on May 12, 2022 |
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May 11, 2022 22:38
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vortmax posted:I can see this just fine when it's still, but my brain slides off it in motion. I can maybe get a couple of plays of the fish swimming before it quits working. AFAIK I don't have any seizure disorders. FYI the video that was not an embed in Serth's post is now an embed in your post. You should probably change that.
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May 11, 2022 22:42
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:FYI the video that was not an embed in Serth's post is now an embed in your post. You should probably change that.
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May 12, 2022 00:46
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Yeah the auto-embedding catches me by surprise every time I link something as well. Regarding the apparently increased risk to my health regarding the testing I do: I see it from the perspective of a minefield on a busy road. Either I start clearing out the mines and teach others what causes them to be laid at increased risk to my own health. Or I stop clearing them and just trial and error my way through the minefield every day, trying to remember where the ones I triggered were so I don't step on them again. The second choice won't keep me safer in the long run since the minefield is always growing and I can't keep track of all the ones I've found so far. This also doesn't keep anyone else from stepping on the same mines. I do this because it means others don't have to. I also do this because I see this as the long term most effective way to reduce the threat to my own health. A third option would be to cut off the part of my lifestyle that is exposed to this kind of triggers. As I've documented in this thread, that means TV (which I don't watch), smartphones (Which I don't use, I have an ancient cheap flip-phone) and video games (which is basically 80% of my life since I'm permanently retired on disability due to mental issues and epilepsy). I've chosen to make the part of my life, that takes up 80% of my active day, safer for myself and others in the longterm at the expense of short term risks and a risk of my life expectancy being reduced. Its important to go into this sort of thing with a clear mind and as a result of serious deliberation.
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May 12, 2022 06:07
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Checkout what I just came across. https://twitter.com/COMPAMED/status/1525109088887132160 This sounds like it might be a huge help in narrowing down all the nitty gritty details about exactly where the thresholds are when it comes to video games triggering seizures. I'm definitely gonna have to reach out to that group and see if we can work something out.
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May 13, 2022 15:49
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Ah the minefields of accessibility. So EA is doing a big push on accessibility specifically aimed towards colorblind players. So far so great. Unfortunately their 20 seconds long video announcing it just hosed my epilepsy up. Harmful links are intentionally made unclickable, copy/paste them into to an address bar to see them. This link SHOULD take you to the reply I made to their Video post. Specifically between 0:13 and 0:15 was very bad for me https://twitter.com/SerthVarnee/status/1527588045683294208 SerthVarnee fucked around with this message at 12:13 on Oct 30, 2022 |
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May 20, 2022 10:57
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Okay just about back to normal now, except for the fatigue. So yeah that was 2 seconds of video wasting 7 hours of my life. I do hope they pay attention to the feedback I sent them. Haven't heard much yet.
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May 20, 2022 17:57
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Welp add Red Solstice 2: Survivor to the list of games that don't play nice. There are a couple of maps (including main plot missions) that apparently needed some good old fashioned lightning going on in the background (as opposed to their regular "actually has an effect on the gameplay" lightning strikes). This background lightning is rapid flashing enough that my roommate could at a glance that it was going to be a problem. And a problem it certainly was. Not a big hitter in the grand scheme of things, but certainly enough to ruin my next 20-30 minutes. Aside from the lightning, they also have a playable class called a Terminator. Super great class. Can't stand the visual effects from 2 or 3 of its most important skills. They don't really knock me out or give me a recovery period to speak of, but every time they pop up, its like getting slapped in the face. Gets real tiresome real quick.
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May 29, 2022 08:49
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Out of curiosity, how much is your daily life affected by your epilepsy? Like, does it affect what sort of jobs you can do, do you get special accommodations in some way, is it difficult to do certain common things? And how much time do you spend sick?
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May 30, 2022 15:59
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I'm medically retired. Have been since the age of 21. However while that retirement grants me a full disability pension, I'm oddly enough NOT compensated for my epilepsy. I got mine from a combination of 10 year long depression, ADHD/ADD, Schizoid Tendencies, Malnutrition and self-harm through apathy due to the aforementioned depression. The epilepsy might have played a role in their decision making, but as far as I know its not listed among the causes for their approval. The daily life is heavily impacted. Stress can and will set off seizures, I get stressed if I have more than two or three appointments outside of my home at specific times (personal interest in the appointments is irrelevant, its just the deadline aspect of the schedule that fucks me up), this includes work. Last time I had a real job, I lasted a week before suffering a nervous breakdown. And that was in a good working environment. Usually I spend 2-4 hours in a state of recovery after each epilepsy triggering incident. Sometimes I get four triggers in a weekend, sometimes one trigger in three months. Not that I really want them to happen often, but the unknowable nature of the trigger frequency is quite mentally taxing. SerthVarnee fucked around with this message at 21:11 on May 31, 2022 |
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May 31, 2022 21:06
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I definitely wouldn't ask you to look at it, and I don't know for sure how you'd manage to see it on purpose without having to dig for it. But I noticed that one of the new items in Love Nikki is a...brightly-coloured airplane, with a spinning, flashing propeller. And it has a digital aesthetic, so it was very popular in one of the last server-wide contests. I don't have epilepsy, but one of my cousins does, and I was getting eyestrain and just feeling uncomfortable looking at the spinning propeller. I'm not even sure how to go about telling the devs that this is an issue, since I know this is a translated game and I'm not even sure the devs read English well enough that I could get across "Hey, this one item that I don't even know the name of is a potential epilepsy risk".
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May 31, 2022 22:35
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Hook me up with a link and I'll take a look at it with my "special elven eyes". Regarding how much epilepsy can interfere with daily life: If someone suffers a Gran Mal seizure (the one that knocks you unconscious), they get their driver's license suspended automatically until they have gone up to 6 months without a seizure. https://www.epilepsy.com/lifestyle/driving-and-transportation/laws/california/texas Imagine having to adjust your work life to that just happening on a semi random basis.
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Jun 1, 2022 05:18
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One of the scariest things I've ever seen is seeing the person driving in front of me having a seizure. We saw them slow down, then realized that the driver was jerking around right about when they started to veer off the road and into a stone wall. Fortunately it was a little backroad and they were barely going walking speed by the time they hit so there were no injuries from the crash. The person driving the car I was in was in EMS and was able to smash their window and get them out. That was probably seven years ago now. I've always wondered if they had any idea that they were prone to seizures. There's every possibility that they went for a drive with absolutely no idea, and then just suddenly woke up in the ambulance or hospital with absolutely no idea how they got there and a doctor telling them that they've got a potentially life-threatening condition and aren't allowed to drive again. Or maybe they knew, but though that they'd gotten past it. It's stuck with me.
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Jun 1, 2022 06:27
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SerthVarnee posted:Hook me up with a link and I'll take a look at it with my "special elven eyes". It's a mobile game. So that's going to be an adventure. Here's a link to their Facebook page, which has a "play" button on it: https://m.facebook.com/LoveNikkiGame/ I suspect the whole thing might be problematic for epilepsy, actually. There's a lot of non-optional spinny graphics for every reward screen.
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Jun 1, 2022 06:43
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tinytort posted:It's a mobile game. So that's going to be an adventure. Here's a link to their Facebook page, which has a "play" button on it: https://m.facebook.com/LoveNikkiGame/ Well from the parts that I could look at on their facebook page alone, there was nothing that stood out. But that was likely because they basically didn't show me ANY gameplay at all. I don't have a smartphone so I can't check out the actual game itself, sorry.
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Jun 1, 2022 15:44
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SerthVarnee posted:Well from the parts that I could look at on their facebook page alone, there was nothing that stood out. But that was likely because they basically didn't show me ANY gameplay at all. Yeah, I figured you wouldn't be able to once I poked around and figured out that it's mobile-exclusive. Unless you used BlueStacks or something, that's not happening for you. It's fine. I'm not about to ask you to get a type of phone you explicitly avoid using, just so that you can take a look at a weird mobile game and see if parts of it might trigger your epilepsy. And I'm not going to ask you install an emulator to try and look at it either.
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Jun 2, 2022 02:20
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I can't find any gifs or anything of it in motion but it apparently looks like this, so you can imagine if this was moving it would probably be pretty bad. Especially considering the place I found this is a Reddit thread warning people with epilepsy about it. Though comments in that thread say they added a "disable animations" setting recently, but also that it's bugged and might not work, so, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Jun 2, 2022 03:07
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Nighthand posted:I can't find any gifs or anything of it in motion but it apparently looks like this, so you can imagine if this was moving it would probably be pretty bad. So that's an interesting kind of image since I can see it go both ways. It could be a complete nonissue even though the propellers are moving at a high speed. It could be a complete show-stopper both at high speeds but also if it's rotating slowly. Depends a lot on how the propeller rotation is animated. The fix to turn off animations only working at a 50/50 rate is depressingly normal unfortunately.
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Jun 2, 2022 03:26
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Nighthand posted:I can't find any gifs or anything of it in motion but it apparently looks like this, so you can imagine if this was moving it would probably be pretty bad. That's the one. I had no clue what it was called, so trying to search for it felt like it was going to require scrolling through thousands of items until I found the right one. SerthVarnee posted:So that's an interesting kind of image since I can see it go both ways. It's a very flickery sort of animation. Enough so that I'm actually not really comfortable with the idea of trying to find an animated clip of it, since I know I don't have the skills needed to make sure it's not embedded or anything on the first try. Especially when I'm in the middle of getting ready for work.
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Jun 2, 2022 11:59
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