Some way to cap how epileptic presets can be

[DuendeInexistente]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Some presets are good. Others will have every color in the spectrum flashing through the screen every frame.

Describe the solution you'd like
Some setting to cap this (Maybe limiting how different from the previous frame every given pixel can be in RGB values, and cut the difference in half until it's within acceptable ranges) would be greatly appreciated and turn this into not a health hazard.

Describe alternatives you've considered
A curated list of presets that cut out the epileptic stuff. Sounds like an undertaking considering the amount of presets shipped, thou. Though it could be done programatically.

[kblaschke]

This is definitely something I've experienced many times during testing, always thinking that projectM's code is bad - only to see that these presets flicker exactly the same way in Milkdrop.

Sadly, there's no easy solution to this. We simply can't compare each and every pixel between frames: this would amount to 16 million comparisons in 4K, if we only compare the exact same pixels between each frame, and don't account for movement etc.

A programmatic solution is doable I'd say, as this doesn't need to happen in real time. I could see a tool that plays a list of presets, renders a number of frames (30 or so amounting to .5s would suffice) and then calculate the absolute color/brightness difference between all these frames. This should give a good indication of how much flickering is there, and then presets above a certain value can be sorted out. Working through the "Cream of the Crop" preset pack would then take about an hour, which isn't too bad.

I currently don't have the resources to start another side project, so any volunteer stepping up to write such a tool would be great!

[revmischa]

Yeah or we can remove them from the giant preset bundle as people report them. I don't think they're precious and need to be in the pack personally.

[OfficialIncubo]

Some suksma mashups may have presets that has seizures, not the projectM itself.

EDIT: The following comp shader code that can flickers/has a seizure is:
if (frame%2==0) {ret = 1-ret;}
It inverts and uninverts the entire screen every frame.
1st frame: inverted
2nd frame: uninverted
3rd frame: inverts again
...and so on!

[kblaschke]

Yeah or we can remove them from the giant preset bundle as people report them. I don't think they're precious and need to be in the pack personally.

That! Exactly!
At some point, I fear I'll get an epileptic seizure looking at those while testing. Really uncomfortable.
Whenever I stumble upon one of those, I'll delete it locally and from time to time push the change to GitHub. If anyone else can name presets in the "Cream of the Crop" pack, please post the relative filename(s) below.

Some suksma mashups may have presets that has seizures, not the projectM itself.
Exactly, at some point I though "well, what did I miss in the render code?" but then looked at the shaders and saw it's exactly how they write the presets - for whatever reason.

Having a tool to automatically filter or at least narrow down such presets would still be a great thing, especially if people are using their own preset packs and want to clean those up.

[OfficialIncubo]

Mine not. I still feel comfortable by seeing some epileptic presets. As a very experienced Milkdrop visualization user, it's still mesmerizing and calming while watching all the presets. That's a huge amount of breathtaking imo. I'm still surviving. I know that anyone has a seizure phobia (or feeling uncomfortable from seeing epileptic things).
Idk if I tell some presets that has seizures. I'll check the unorganized Cream of the Crop presets, look at some seizury presets, then I'll share the unseizured one.

[kblaschke]

Here's one example I've tested with a few days ago.

suksma - ed geining hateops - flx squeakers novelty vs permanance.milk

[DuendeInexistente]

Seizure stuff could still be shipped but in a separate folder. If a user wants ti they can jut drag the "warning, seizure" folder to the main presets folder.

[kblaschke]

If anyone has the time to skip through the 9000+ presets and delete all the epileptic ones in a pull request, that woul be amazing! I don't think anyone would really like to see those.
This must not necessarily be done in one go - pick one of the subdirs in ther repo at a time, and simply note here which dir is already cleaned up.

I'd support this by adding a temporary UI feature (or shortcut) in my SDL frontend working branch to quickly delete an unwanted preset directly from the app. I'll provide a pre-built archive for the respective OS - just drop a note here, visit our Discord or email me via my GitHub profile.

[YutMarma]

I think removing some presets because some people don't like them is pretty anathema to the spirit of MilkDrop. I personally enjoy the more flashy/gaudy presets, they bring me back to the good old "rave days".

With all due respect, I don't think it's right that presets should be deleted for everyone based on the views of a vocal minority. I don't think I should have to take extra steps to truly see all the "cream of the crop" presets.

[kblaschke]

Please remember that it's not just a matter of taste in this case, but also a potential health issue. People susceptible to epilepsy can have a really bad time being exposed to such imagery, so it's at least responsible behavior to reduce exposure to health-threatening visuals - there's a very good reason most games and some movies show a clear epilepsy warning at the very beginning.

It's just about the default preset collection shipping with projectM applications. We're not going to change any preset collection out there, or keep people from using their own.

[revmischa]

Please remember that it's not just a matter of taste in this case, but also a potential health issue. People susceptible to epilepsy can have a really bad time being exposed to such imagery, so it's at least responsible behavior to reduce exposure to health-threatening visuals - there's a very good reason most games and some movies show a clear epilepsy warning at the very beginning.

It's just about the default preset collection shipping with projectM applications. We're not going to change any preset collection out there, or keep people from using their own.

Well-put, yes.

[dpw13]

According to https://www.epilepsy.com/stories/shedding-light-photosensitivity-one-epilepsys-most-complex-conditions-0, we want to mark anything flashing at faster than about 3 Hz as potentially risky. However, that page also mentions pattern-based epilepsy sensitivity, which I was not aware of. I have a dev branch that logs the change in brightness per-pixel each frame, but finding striping patterns is going to be much more difficult. I suggest starting with the time-based analysis, placing each preset that flashes faster than 3 Hz into a separate folder structure, and then watching for pattern-based presets that may cause further issues.

[OfficialIncubo]

Hey! I found a part of the code in the warp shader code that it gets seizury:

ret.z=1-ret.y;
ret.y=1-ret.x;
ret.x=1-ret.z;

From the preset: cleave and cleave to thine wive's cleavage thankee sai for more trippy ass s*** hail (marked as * to prevent foul language)