Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI
110 points by Velocifyer 2 days ago | 75 comments
susam 21 hours ago
I often write small userscripts to neutralise hostile or annoying UI patterns. I played the 'Hostile Volume' game for a while. Nice game! After a while, I wondered: if this were a real hostile website, could I write a userscript to make each level happy? Here is the script:
reply // ==UserScript==
// @name Hostile Volume Winner
// @match https://hostilevolume.com/
// ==/UserScript==
(function () {
const s = document.createElement('script')
s.textContent = `
(function () {
function visible (id) {
return !document.getElementById(id).classList.contains('hidden')
}
function win () {
if (visible('victory-screen')) return
if (visible('instructions-modal')) {
document.getElementById('start-btn').click()
setTimeout(win, 2000)
return
}
setTimeout(function () {
document.getElementById('l13-age-input').value = '01011970'
window.cancelAnimationFrame(levels[currentLevelIndex].frame)
}, 100)
window.setVolume(25)
setTimeout(win, 3500)
}
win()
})()
`
document.body.appendChild(s)
})()
graypegg 2 days 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.
replydsmason321 24 hours ago
I'll have to patch that!
replydiacritical 22 hours ago
Please don't. The game was fun, but level 22 didn't work on Tor Browser due to CORS errors. At first I thought the "NETWORK ERROR. TRY AGAIN" was part of the game until I saw the actual network tab. I wouldn't have made it past level 22 if not for the console command. Plus, if someone wants to cheat, why not?
replyua709 19 hours ago
I am familiar with this game. I play a variant of it on iOS everyday, sometimes multiple times a day, with my AirPods and iPhone. I'm not very good though. Somehow iOS always wins and finds a hostile volume to initiate playback with regardless of what I do with the UI.
replymort96 9 hours ago
iOS is great! I especially like how they tied the "alarm through speakers" volume to the "notifications through earbuds" volume so that you can choose between "loud enough to wake you up in the morning and also burst your ear drums when you receive a notification with earbuds in" and "quiet enough to make notifications comfortable and also not wake you up in the morning". Truly genius parody of hostile UX.
replyikekkdcjkfke 8 hours ago
Their audio router (if any) needs a rewrite
replyMereInterest 7 hours ago
I particularly love how they will periodically choose to only use the selected Bluetooth device for audio output, and will instead switch back to the builtin microphone. The builtin microphone may be in my pocket or across the room, and so the only indication I get is when the person on the other end of the line says that I’ve dropped off.
replyNothing changes in the UI to indicate this, nor could I find any setting to change this. Sometimes swapping the audio away from the headset and back to it helps, but it it at best a temporary fix.
Retr0id 2 days ago
There are two types of volume slider I've encountered thus far, "too logarithmic", and "not logarithmic enough".
replyembedding-shape 2 days ago
That's because one ear is logarithmic-based and the other is exponential-based. Which one differs per person.
replyJulianWasTaken 2 days 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.
replyErroneousBosh 22 hours ago
It's actually possible to turn a linear pot into an approximation of a log pot by wiring a resistor in parallel with the wiper and one end. The volume pot is a voltage divider so the amount it "scales" by is given by Scale = Rbottom / (Rtop + Rbottom).
replyBut, if you put a resistor in parallel, you need to work out that:
R = 1 / ((1 / R1) + (1 / R2)) or Rbottom = 1 / ((1 / Rbottom) + (1 / Rfixed)) where Rfixed is the amount you're "bending" it by.
So you could make the amount of "logness" be adjustable by having another (linear) control to vary Rfixed.
You'd work out, for a pot rotation Vol from 0 to 1:
Rbottom = 1 / ((1 / Vol) + (1 / Rfixed)) Rtop = 1 - Vol Scale = Rbottom / (Rbottom + Rtop)
Now for those better at arithmetic than me, how can you reverse this? Imagine you've got a pot in a piece of equipment with a resistor between the wiper and ground giving a log curve, and you've got to read that with an ADC and turn it back into the linear position of the wiper.
It ought to be possible but I've always sucked at arithmetic.
dsmason321 2 days ago
Level 17 is NOT bugged. The slider is backward and the volume nonresponsive. Its a planned feature.
replyxnx 2 days ago
The worst volume control UI in the world (2017): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27819384
replypimlottc 22 hours ago
This works for almost all levels:
reply for (i = 0; i < 50; i++) { document.querySelector("#l3-down").click(); }VerifyID 8 hours ago
level 19, after watching the video a wonderful 4 times it doesnt unlock anything to change the volume. the only saving grace setVolume(25) has been patched :(
replyapublicfrog 22 hours ago
Great fun, well done to the horrible person who made it. Apparently my RSS reader leaves the browswr live in the background, as the audio is still playing. Horrible to do on a mobile device. Worst level by far was 17.
replyTheLNL 2 days 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
replymacromagnon 23 hours ago
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.
replyjimkleiber 2 days ago
Got an error on Level 17, just a heads up.
replyLove the game, btw.
chaps 23 hours ago
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.
replydsmason321 2 days ago
Its intentional. Glad you like it!
replydeanCommie 21 hours ago
ok but i manually used arrow keys to set it to by clicking right 25 times, and that didn't work, so i gave up.
replyFindecanor 2 days ago
I have encountered the rate-limited spinner (#8) and the self-resizing slider (#5) in real desktop UIs.
reply#3 are almost like Google Maps' zooming buttons. They jump around more, making you click on the map itself or swap in/out.
Leomuck 3 hours ago
What the hell. I got so annoyed at level 5 I had to quit :D
But I love the idea. It can actually teach you a lot of things about UI design.
replyDrSiemer 2 days ago
Plenty of annoyance in here for sure. Looks like 17 cannot be finished on mobile though. Switching to desktop view resets progress.
replyRRRA 24 hours ago
Not sure how on desktop either, I've inspected the value and set it to 25 to no avail :P
replyedit: ok... somehow my approach didn't work the first time, but got to 18!
dsmason321 24 hours ago
It works fine on mobile. Planned feature. You'll encounter the same offscreen popup on desktop.
replyapublicfrog 22 hours ago
Look where the slider sits initially at 75%, not the same as earlier levels ;)
replyLoganDark 23 hours ago
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.
replydanjl 24 hours ago
...and, of course, there's really no need for a volume control in any app, since there's already a system volume...
replyf1shy 24 hours ago
There are cases where you want to have 2 applications running and playing sound, and want to set the relative volume of each...
reply
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?
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.
https://recycledgoods.com/nec-cdr-400-3x-scsi-external-plus-...
I've never noticed because I use a Steel Series headset which presents as two output sound devices to Windows, the idea being that you can independently control the volume of your "game" and your "chat" application. Turns out it's useful for Teams as well.
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…
The debian bug linked there implies it started 2012 or earlier, and ended in 2019.