Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI
hostilevolume.com62 points by Velocifyer 4 hours ago
62 points by Velocifyer 4 hours ago
My favourite bad volume control was in Real Player around 1997 where changing the volume in the application actually changed the global volume of Windows.
I was so confused by the CD drives of that era. They all had a volume wheel and a headphone jack, but never once did I experience those working. The audio CDs were always “owned” by the OS, which piped the audio through the normal channels out my speakers or the PC headphone jack.
I imagine the existence of those means that CD drives had their own DAC and other logic. I guess there was an idea of wanting to play CD audio without it being a PC concern? Or on PCs without audio capability?
Almost all IDE and SCSI CD-ROM drives were indeed capable of playing audio CDs fully autonomously, with the host PC basically only sending them the command to start playing; many drives took it one step further and provided a play button in addition to the usual eject button, which worked even if the drive wasn't plugged at all into a machine. The audio was typically output both to the front panel headphone jack and to a 4-pin connector on the back of the drive, which you were supposed to connect to one of your sound card's aux inputs so that it would get mixed into the system audio output.
Unfortunately, a decent number of machines were not fitted with the relevant cable. Combined with the low-quality DACs that most drives used, the compatibility issues that plagued ATAPI implementations and the dramatic increase in CPU power and sound card quality throughout the mid-to-late 90s, this led media player software to quickly move on from drive based playback to so-called "digital audio extraction", where the CD is basically ripped in real time and streamed to your sound card's own DAC. Thus, unless you played older games that relied on hardware CD-DA playback [1], it's somewhat unlikely you ever experienced it under, say, Windows 98 or XP.
[1] As offloading playback to the drive had no CPU overhead, games often stored their music as additional tracks on the game disc and played it that way. Incidentally, basically all CD-ROM-based game consoles and arcade systems relied heavily on hardware accelerated playback as well, with some going even further and allowing for compressed (ADPCM) CD audio streaming with no CPU intervention.
They absolutely had a DAC. The earlier commercial CD-ROM drives used an internal audio cable connected to a dedicated input on the sound card pcb for cd-audio. It was years before audio players used digital audio streams.
I remember my father powering one of these old cd ROM drives, without a computer and using it to play music CDs using these jack connecter
I feel like that was super common. Apart from changing the volumes of entire channels (e.g. changing the level of Line In vs. digital sound), volume was a relatively “global” thing.
And I’m not sure if that was still the case in 1997, but most likely changing the volume of digital sound meant the CPU having to process the samples in realtime. Now on one hand, that’s probably dwarfed by what the CPU had to do for decompressing the video. On the other hand, if you’re already starved for CPU time…
That was a hardware/software thing as far as I remember. If it was using something like DirectSound it would adjust the audio independently. Other media players did the same thing.
This is not an issue at all, but when ever I come across something like it, I like to poke at the frontend in dev tools a bit. You can pass most levels with `setVolume(25)` in the web console, since that function is just sitting in the document object. That feels like the ultimate volume UI puzzle heh.
I'll have to patch that!
I had to use it for #19, since YouTube doesn't load on my machine. Patching it would make the game unplayable past level 19.
There are two types of volume slider I've encountered thus far, "too logarithmic", and "not logarithmic enough".
That's because one ear is logarithmic-based and the other is exponential-based. Which one differs per person.
Do you have a source, that seems unlikely at face value to me, though I've never gone and looked for perception studies myself.
The worst volume control UI in the world (2017): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27819384
Hilarious, some of them are easy with the keyboard
Finished the game. It was fun to play. I got stuck for a while on the opposite level where the display doesn't update, but was able to go through the rest just fine
I could tell in edge that right side was muted based on the icon next to the address bar and noticed you could use arrows to move one by one so just pressed left 25 times.
Got an error on Level 17, just a heads up.
Love the game, btw.
Yeah, I took that to mean to refresh the game and so I did.... and then lost my progress :(. I really want to play the rest but I don't want to go through the rest of the levels.
Laughed out loud but gave up at level 5
Level 17 is NOT bugged. The slider is backward and the volume nonresponsive. Its a planned feature.
These mostly seem to be variations of "takes a long time / is tedious" rather than "annoying/fiddly / takes skill / is creatively bad", which is a little disappointing.
somehow i'm amazed and annoyed at the same time
Plenty of annoyance in here for sure. Looks like 17 cannot be finished on mobile though. Switching to desktop view resets progress.
Not sure how on desktop either, I've inspected the value and set it to 25 to no avail :P
edit: ok... somehow my approach didn't work the first time, but got to 18!
It works fine on mobile. Planned feature. You'll encounter the same offscreen popup on desktop.
...and, of course, there's really no need for a volume control in any app, since there's already a system volume...
There are cases where you want to have 2 applications running and playing sound, and want to set the relative volume of each...
I mean technically that is a system level feature...and there's nothing really wrong with an application adjusting it's own volume as defined by a system level volume setting for that app.
I have encountered the rate-limited spinner (#8) and the self-resizing slider (#5) in real desktop UIs.
#3 are almost like Google Maps' zooming buttons. They jump around more, making you click on the map itself or swap in/out.
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