I know there would be an element of trust involved in this, but if it came to this I would be more than happy to use some of my own web space I got from my ISP to host the file. Then again the snapshot may very well occur first, but my offer stands.

I know I've said this a lot, but again thankyou for your efforts. I look forward to it.

Well that took a little longer than expected, sorry about that.Some bugs I thought easy to fix have turned out not to be. The development release should be testable, but there will be a lot of junk messages in the interface.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile … p_id=47079

There is a clientsettings.xml file in the mmconf folder, you might need to run the game once to make it appear. You should replace it with this file:
http://www.angelfire.com/anime4/cattyne … ttings.xml

which will cause it to use the swing GUI and print a lot of extra information to the chat window. Some of the information is wrong however, so I definitely recommend small games against a sighted person only. Also the swing GUI is extremely buggy, I found minimizing and restoring it a few seconds later often fixed the problem but not always. Still all the swing components should be readable unlike the AWT components many of whom cannot be read by a screen-reader.

the client commands start with a #, #help will list them all. Server commands start with a /, /help will list them all. There is some overlap between the two, the client command is generally better.

That is odd.

The welcome to megamek notification is at the top of the menu, and the buttons are underneath that. Swing is supposed to be easier for screen readers to handle so this shouldn't be happening if the AWT interface works.

Well thanks, you have pointed out a pretty fundamental problem. I'll look into it as time permits.

www.nvda-project.org though I'm not sure how well it supports Java.

You can also get a time limited demo (minutes per boot not days after install) from www.freedomscientific.com for Jaws, the reader I'm using.

Odd, I tried it with the standard gui and the game seems to stop accepting commands after I try a #move command other than select such as walk, or the first time I accidentally entered #move followed by coordinates without the walk parameter. It won't even accept chat messages after this. Not sure what is going on.

I thank you for your efforts thus far and hope the problems aren't too major.

Well we appreciate the work you put in, thankyou. I know I'll be ready to help in any way I can, but I know real life has to come first.

It includes the ability to play against a computer opponent even as it is. It isn't exactly an "online" game since you need to download the game, which runs on your computer so it is really an offline game with a multiplayer option.

Think like Audio Quake in terms of the online/offline thing, though play is nothing like that game obviously.

It's a conversion of a fairly complex board game so there is little to no sounds, and the screen reader support is still work in progress as it would appear. However in time perhaps more sounds could be added, not sure where they plan to go with this.

If you ever heard of Battletech, or Mechwarrior, this game is based on the Battletech board game which was the original source of these.

Sent, interested to hear how Hal does with it.

well, just a couple of extra thoughts having given things a bit more of a whack.

firstly, I wondered if Hal's virtual focus would recognize the hexes, so that I could vaguely try out movement, even if it wouldn't read them.

apparently not unfortunately, the only movement related stuff I can get to with hal are the various scroll arrows for the map, so extra commands in this line are deffinately a good idea.

then, hal seemed to have an issue with the mech display window. the 2nd game I started, the computer (aka Trainee B), went first, and Hal seemed to get stuck in a window where the only readable thing was "Wasp V128" or something of the sort, which seemed to be the model of Mech I was using (as it said in the readme file for the training scenarios).

However, I couldn't get Hal out of this window for some reason, ---- I'm afraid the only reason i knew an extra window was open was because I could see a blue rectangular thingy on the green map). I closed that with alt F4, but then, when trying to look at it again with the "mech status" command in the view menue, couldn't get Hal back into it.

I'm mildly confused about why this is happening, sinse Hal read all the other popups (like the name dialogue and readme dialogues), fairly well by using the virtual focus. This also goes for the "lode unit?" pop up.

to explain, the virtual focus is an imaginary curser you can wander around the screen with, which will recognize buttons etc, and often tab betwene objects. It's also great for reading random text that doesn't appear nere the curser, ----- I've always found it handy in playing interactive fiction.

the vf seemed to work okay with the chat line, and recognized it as an edit area, but on a couple of occasions when I tried to type in there, the program closed for some reason, ----- is there a "quit" graphic somewhere around there?

appologies for the complaints here, I'm just trying to give as complete feedback as poss).

Oh, and for the record I'm using hal version 6.53, but will be installing Version 7 very soon.

Well given the huge diversity of factions there seems to be in the batletech universe, it's not too surprising that there's a huge variety of meks and other units to choose from, ---- as well as hundreds of battles and locations to play with.

In fact as you thought Cx2, the history certainly appeals to me, though it's quite a lot to take in at one go.

Is it possible to gain any information about the various game rules and mekanics of mega Mek? and the various strengths and weaknesses of the units?

Finding the classic Batletech site, it appears you can buyrulebooks from them, but there's not a lot online, ---- and anyway I'm not sure how much those rules and such would apply to megamek.

I hope this isn't a similar situation to D&d, where the game makers actively repress reasonable explantion of the game rules over the net so that they can sell more books, ------ luckily I know the 2nd Edition rules relatively well, and the gang I play Ad&D with are quite reasonable about explaning extra stuff, ----- they were actually quite impressed with Gma dice.

Anyway, more info about the meks, and the mechanics would be nice, and also mean that when Megamek is up and running, I'll be able to get to grips with the game as soon as I've got my head around the interface.