Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI

48•Velocifyer•2h ago

Comments

Findecanor•1h ago

When clicking on this topic, I had anticipated it to be about GTK 3.x's messed up sliders.

This was more fun, in a dystopian kind of way. I have sure encountered the rate-limited spinner and the self-resizing slider in real UIs. Perhaps GTK's behaviour is on a level that I have not reached.

jupin•1h ago

Laughed out loud but gave up at level 5

Retr0id•1h ago

There are two types of volume slider I've encountered thus far, "too logarithmic", and "not logarithmic enough".

embedding-shape•1h ago

That's because one ear is logarithmic-based and the other is exponential-based. Which one differs per person.

JulianWasTaken•1h ago

Do you have a source, that seems unlikely at face value to me, though I've never gone and looked for perception studies myself.

KolmogorovComp•1h ago

It’s satire.

JulianWasTaken•1h ago

Always hard to tell.

graypegg•1h ago

I think they're joking, this is on a thread about silly volume control UX

tobr•1h ago

Meanwhile, iPhone is still using this design https://xkcd.com/1884/

jimkleiber•1h ago

Got an error on Level 17, just a heads up.

Love the game, btw.

TheLNL•1h ago

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

xnx•1h ago

The worst volume control UI in the world (2017): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27819384

graypegg•1h ago

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.

DrSiemer•1h ago

Plenty of annoyance in here for sure. Looks like 17 cannot be finished on mobile though. Switching to desktop view resets progress.

RRRA•30m ago

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!

jonathanlydall•46m 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.

whycome•26m ago

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.

anyfoo•20m ago

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…

danjl•29m ago

...and, of course, there's really no need for a volume control in any app, since there's already a system volume...

f1shy•19m ago

There are cases where you want to have 2 applications running and playing sound, and want to set the relative volume of each...

Pipe94•10m ago

somehow i'm amazed and annoyed at the same time

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Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI

Comments

Gimp 3.2 Released

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Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI

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CSMWrap: Legacy BIOS booting on UEFI-only systems via SeaBIOS

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