I’ve been distracted from figuring out first and third person games after getting into Caves of Qud recently. I had a bit of a minor breakthrough playing it this afternoon with Talon and the dance pad, so I figured that’s an excuse to post here.
I had never played CoQ before, but it’s been on my radar ever since it came up on 3MA ages ago. A dance pad is basically just a big numpad so I decided to give it a try. You could play the whole thing with Talon alone, since there’s big user interface hints for every keyboard shortcut so it’s very easy play out of the box with Talon’s phonetic alphabet. In fact the word for the letter L in the alphabet is “look” which is just perfect, since that’s the command in CoQ to look around the world and read descriptions. But it’s so easy to bind a new word or phrase to a key press in Talon that was easy to quickly build up a file full of commands that match the actions in the game, here’s a sample, to give you an idea how easy it is. This just goes in a plain text file in Talon’s user directory and it gets picked up automatically
overlay on: key(alt:down)
overlay off: key(alt:up)
abilities: key(a)
move: key(w)
character: key(x)
inventory: key(i)
equipment: key(e)
quests: key(q)
tinker: key(k)
powers: key(p)
But what I’m doing is combining it with the dance pad bound to the numpad keys, and using that for movement and menu navigation. You can just tap, or in my case step, repeatedly in the direction you want to move but there’s also an automatic movement mode. That works by first pressing the walk key, and then pressing on the numpad the direction you want to move, after which your character will proceed in that direction until running into a wall, seeing an enemy, or until you press the walk key again. So I bound that key to the word “move” (instead of “walk” because that gets confused for “look”) and have been roaming around learning the game with that.
But today I had an idea after seeing some discussion on the Talon Slack. It turns out that it’s not too hard to turn Talon’s pop to click into a context-sensitive action. I’ve set up my Talon such that in every application except for CoQ the pop noise is bound to mouse clicks (or activating the eye tracker zoom mouse mode if the eye tracker is on). But in CoQ the pop is bound to the W key. So now I can pop, then step on the pad to pick a direction, and pop again to stop moving.
(for posterity here’s the code: 1 2)
It’s pretty minor victory but I was still excited after figuring it out. It’s really amazing the difference that having a common action bound to a low latency noise makes. And of course this is a testament to the flexibility of Talon. I think the dev was very wise to design it such that even though there is a closed source core at the heart of the system, everything else is hackable
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The rest of this post touches a little bit on the medical side of my situation and others like it, so I’m going to put it behind a spoiler tag. Content warning for discussions of chronic pain and related issues
This experience reminded me of this talk by Naomi Saphra that I watched a few weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKYWt8B9hgs
The whole talk is one I highly recommend for anyone interested in this subject and I think the Waypoint community would appreciate the attitude that Naomi brings to the topic, to put it not so lightly the talk has real “fuck capitalism, go home” energy.
In the talk they discuss Talon specifically and relate it to several situations where other communities of disabled folks have had to come up with their own solutions because they weren’t being served well by existing institutions. However one bit specifically stood out to me and I thought of it this afternoon:
When you’re in this much pain it is tempting to think of yourself as in a waiting room, that the pain is something you just have to wait out until a doctor fixes you and you can resume your life. I don’t care if you find that miracle cure, there’s no resuming your life because this is your life, this whole bit that you’re living in. So do not let a year go by just trapped in the metaphorical waiting room. It took me a long time to realize that it was time for me to do things that made my life enjoyable in the moment like learning to dictate code, rather than waiting for someone to fix me.
To be honest hearing this brought me to tears. My condition is not even so severe as some people I know, but it has not been easy. However it is easy into falling into this trap of the waiting room. A minor victory like figuring out how to make it easier to play Caves of Qud can sometimes feel a bit silly but this quote reminds me that there’s value in this kind of tinkering.
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I would be remiss if I didn’t include a link to this article from the verge, which was published on Friday: When games are hard on their hands, some players turn their voices into controllers - The Verge It’s not really specifically related to anything in this post, but the developer behind Parrot.py was interviewed and mentioned Talon. There’s a lot of great stuff in this article and some of the other pieces in the series seem pretty interesting to
I’ll take what I can get.
