I'm a player with epilepsy

[Haikuart]

Hey you all. So, I'm a player with epilepsy. I am therefore going to make a list of the triggering effects that are super bad for me haha

1. LSD Drugs things with flashy lights
2. The wizard spell that has a similar effect, this one was really bad for me. All the very bright colors and flashes. The weird bright creatures triggered a bad seizure
3. The party button in the bar
4. multicolored changing floor tiles that flash
5. Rainbow strobe effects in general
6. Trippy drugs with visual effects 



Something I think would be helpful would be a toggle or ability to dim and turn off certain lighting effects. I am unaware if this is a possibility already. Just some epilepsy settings in general. The ability to make very bright colors a little dimmer etc.  However, I think it would be very nice to have perhaps a visible player token that everyone can see on characters for epilepsy. So other players recognize it and don't offer or give drugs that cause strobing effects if they aren't aware that person has epilepsy. To anyone who has played with me and used these effects and didn't know I'm not upset at all. I just really want to prevent any issues in the future haha. <3 lots of love.

[Flaborized]

Some thoughts on this:

- I don't think we'll ever be able to fully say in confidence that this game has no content that could trigger photosensitive epilepsy, since there are a lot of mechanics in the game that could potentially cause a flashing or strobe-y adjacent effect. It's something we should avoid when we can, but there'll likely always be some things that could cause it that are unintended or difficult to fix. Possibly the game should display a disclaimer about this on first login or something similar?

- The wizard spell mentioned (I believe) is pandemonium, which can give players LSD and psilocybin (hallucinogenic drugs) at the same time. I think these effects should probably be toned down a bit, both for these two and other color changing drugs. Maybe like a one-time gradual change into a color filter? Instead of repeatedly changing like it does now.

- I'm more in favor of changing drug effects instead of adding a meta tag that shows a player is photosensitive, since there are a lot of ways to administer drugs in this game that aren't targeted and generally I don't think we should be putting the onus on players to manage this. Like, people should feel free to distribute LSD in this game, it just shouldn't have a triggering effect.

- This game does have a saturation effect in the settings menu, though in my testing it doesn't massively reduce the flashiness of these effects all *that* much. Still, could be useful here. It could be a good idea for us to unlock the lower cap on it and let players set it to whatever value they want I suppose. Not that setting your game to black and white is *ideal*, but I don't see why we need to restrict it when it's something a player can reproduce using software of their own anyways.

- Party button and miracle matter I have fewer ideas about how they could be positively changed. Ideally something that keeps their visual coolness while toning them down in some way. idk this is for someone smarter than me

All that said, sorry to hear you had a seizure, that really sucks! Again, I don't think we'll ever be able to actually confidently say this game has nothing in it that can trigger photosensitive epilepsy, even if we fix these issues. Unfortunately, to some degree you'll always have to play at your own risk. We should still definitely fix these sorts of obvious flashy things though, IMO.

[Kotlol]

We can always just install a lesser version of these things or seizure safe version that does something else.
I am not sure what else I can add but... I do think some flash effects are abit intense.

[Cropsey]

I don't want a giant tag on my character saying if I have epilepsy or are photosensitive or whatever. It sounds like a terrible idea.

I don't mean this in a mean way. People aren't nice. I've had someone come up to me and shine a strobe torch in my face upon finding out i was epileptic. It's even easier for people to pull that sort of thing online- you're not attaching your face to you being a shithead. A marker like that is something that weirdly singles someone out and also sticks a target on your back.

It's also to an extent not your responsibility to manage other people's triggers, whether for epilepsy or anxiety or anything else- given you interact with so many people on the internet it's not possible to keep track of what triggers whose what's. You are, in turn, responsible to some extent for your own shit.

It is also NEVER possible for a video game to guarantee safety for a photosensitive epileptic. I know we're all used to seeing those "consult your doctor" screens and laughing them off, but the truth is moving images do flicker, and even in an incredibly static video game (which ss13 is not) things can go wrong. Think Cyberpunk accidentally mimicking Intermittent Photic Stimulation simply because they didn't know better, or that bug in the Sims 3 that turned your sim into a giant flashing ball of flesh. Sometimes risk is inherent and you have to decide whether to risk it or not.

That being said, there are some high-hertz effects in the game that really could use a toggle to a single frame of colour or something. There's that gene that strobes your character, the radstorm effect, and there used to be intermittent bright flashes to simulate lightning in some azones- though I believe those can now be toggled.

These things don't need to be removed from the game, and i think a lot of players would complain about that, but an option to "freeze" their animations could be more feasible, particularly the whole screen overlays since they're all (I think?) managed the same way in the code.

There's my two cents.

[KikiMofo]

I dont see any reason not to have a player toggle that turns down the brightness or the flashing stuff.
Well I suppose one reason would be someone would have to figure out how to code that and I dunno how hard that would be.