Hypertube Blackout

Applies a partially-transparent blackout effect over hypertube travel, to reduce flashing lights caused by hypertube launchers.

The primary purpose of this mod is to reduce the incidence of photosensitive epilepsy triggers when using hypertube launchers, which can create a lot of flashing lights, however it comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, and is provided free of charge. I am not a medical professional nor do I have any expertise in this area. I simply noticed a problem and decided to do what I can to help reduce it. This mod only darkens the screen when inside of hypertubes, it has no effect on normal gameplay, which can have other sources of flashing lights. Use this mod at your own risk, and please verify that it is working before relying on it. I am a sole developer making this in my free time and do not have the budget or the expertise to ensure this is entirely bug-free and will cover all potential triggers.

All that said, I hope it helps anyone who might need it.

There are a number of options for this mod which are explained by their tooltips in-game. The opacity should be left at 1.0 for best results, but can be reduced if you're only using this for aesthetics.

The attack time is tuned to reduce triggers when testing with the photosensitive epilepsy analysis tool (PEAT) from the University of Maryland. 0.3s gave the best results when testing, so this should generally not be messed with.

The analysis tool can be found here, along with guidelines about what constitutes a trigger risk: https://trace.umd.edu/peat/

This mod is provided free of charge and thus can use the PEAT under the terms of its free license.

I decided to make this after I found what I believe to be a new hypertube launcher exploit, which can require the player to stay in the launcher for several seconds of very uncomfortable flashing. It can also trap the player in that situation until the player manually respawns, and if you use my hypertube launcher, this will definitely happen to you at some point. That prompted me to do some testing and I discovered that this was a problem with all hypertube launchers. I found that darkening the image to about 20% of its original brightness removed the triggers according to the analysis tool, so this effect reduces brightness to 20% near the centre of the screen. Towards the outside the brightness is more like 2%, which is only done for aesthetic purposes, to make the effect feel like a real physical effect.

I went with the blackout mainly because I think it's funny that ADA designed the hypertube to be just within the tolerances of the pioneer's cybernetically enhanced body, with no regard given for how traumatic the experience is. Plus fighter-pilot style blackouts are cool. I wanted this to be more than a clinical brightness reduction.

There will be much more information on this in a youtube video (link to follow).

The hypertube travel detection and some other functions are used under GPL 3.0, taken from SirDigby's Flashlight Settings mod, found here: https://ficsit.app/mod/FlashlightSettings