I

personally advocate making a strategy game for the blind where most of the

development work is focused on the interface and balance, with no need for

missions. The best known mainstream examples are the Civilisation series,

with the medieval Lords of the Realm series and sci fi Master of Orion

series.

I enjoyed these games immensely prior to my sight loss, and miss

them dearly. The possibilities for tactics are almost limitless, and given

their often random map creation and the long amount of time it takes to play

a single game these games can keep players entertained for hours, with

unbelievable replay value. I would go as far to say that they have unmatched

replay value, if I could still see I'd still be playing Master of Orion 2

and Alpha Centauri, which was made by the same designer as the first

Civilisation game.

cx2

Hello,

If this topic for strategic types, i have a question.
WarCraft

is a really great game, people plays it from all around the world.
Is it

possible to play WarCraft 3 (because it is the newest and the best version)

without a sighted's assistance?
My personal opinion is nope, because i

think the map problem is not solvable with a jfw script (except if the

Warcraft developers give out a "blind" version).
What do you think about

that game?

RJ.

I

suspect that with things like Warcraft 3 the maps would be far too complex

to put ointo speech. The same would be true of most games.

However, if

the map was simplified to a series of regions... Lords of the realm 2 had

the map split into counties, each with their own set of industries. Each

county had a number of fields, and from 0 to multiple forests for getting

lumber, quarries for stone, iron smelting for iron... The game did have

complicated maps because units could move around within counties, but this

could be dropped and still keep a good game.

The sims is popular, but I

wouldn't favour it. There is more development in terms of user play for the

other game types. Going from a small county to ruling a whole country for

example, as opposed to buying people beds and helping them go to the bog.

That's

pretty good thinking there. It wouldn't be suitable for sighted versus

blind play, but an excellent idea.

I think there's room for several

different interpretations of strategy games in the market. I'm thinking

along the lines of designing an engine which allows as much flexibility in

setting as possible and letting the rest be input as data, but I can't find

Direct X SDK files for anything other than Visual Basic. I can't use DX9

because of my version of Visual Studio, and I would really rather use C++

because I was primarily taught with C++, and find it easier to handle. As a

language C++ is far more succinct I feel.

cx2

If the

truth be told C and C++ are faster and more compact than visual basic

anyway, C++ less so but it's easier to write and still much faster and

smaller than VB. VB includes all the library files you use even a tiny part

of, whereas C and C++ include only the parts you need. In effect the visual

basic method is like writing a report and bundling the whole of every book

you reference with the report, as opposed to C and C++ which go through and

mark up what they need from each file before including it in the end

program.

Back on topic I think we havve missed out on a lot, but there is

a lot we can do if we can just convince companies to make the games, or get

ourselves together to make one ourselves.

hello,

I tryed to play this game but it's not accessible at all the

games grand theft auto san andreas i think they should make that into a

speach friendly game,
I know it's a really big and complicated game, but i

mean they could do a part of it, so a blind person could at least get the

fealing of what a sited person is doing in the game.
I hope the programmers

think about this.

cx2,
go to
http://www.blindprogramming.com
for a larj number of great

tutorials about c and c++, visual basic,basic,web programming and design

etc..
as for directX 8 programming(visual basic6)
go

to:
www.agdev.org
thanks
yakir

Hi,
Well, I got blind few time ago, I'd like to learn to program

games.
OK, I'd like to know if I can find a militar strategy game for

blind people or as well an accsesible one.
I am well impressed with Star

Trek Final Conflict and I also hear good things about Galaxy Rangers.
What

can you tell me about this?
I'm not a born english speaker, so, you should

excuse me.
Thanks.

I don't think it is possible to make JFW scripts for games since they don't go through the normal windows system, instead using direct draw rather than putting buttons and edit boxes up on the screen. They essentially control their own GUI as opposed to telling windows to handle it for them and so screen readers likely aren't of use since they ultimately rely on windows.

I firmly believe the ideal solution is to get mainstream games made accessible, but this is sadly the hardest to achieve.

The reason Audio Quake happened was certainly because the developer of the Quake series seems to have been very keen on releasing the game's source code some time after the game has been released. Most of the sales would be over by this point, and even so the artwork levels etc are still copyrighted and cannot be distributed as well as people may not use the engine for commercial purposes.

I think awareness is the first key to success when it comes to convincing mainstream devs to make blind-friendly games.
Forgive me if this sounds ridiculous, but maybe Nintendo or sony aren't even aware of the existance of audiogames.net.
Most people(even the ones familiar with blind and visually impaired) would never even begin to imagine the idea of a blind person playing a computer game of any kind.
I can remember one day I was over at someone's house for whatever reason, playing Super liam. These people were absolutely astonished by the mear thought of a computer game, 100 percent playable by the blind. To them, it was about as unimaginable as a UFO!

My idea is this:
What if we all registered for Nintendo's discussion forums(I'd imagine staff read them), we make our own topic and discuss what blind people would like to have done with video games to make them accessuble. I'd imagine 1 or 2 people wouldn't cut it, but if everyone on the forum jumped in maybe it would give them that badly-needed awareness.
as well, post a link to this very site on the forums, to show them that this isn't some brand-new thing that's randomly popped up among a few random people, but rather something that's been a growing reality for many years.
Sure, we are a small group, Peanuts compared to the population of seeing gamers;but surely there'd be some demand for it world wide!

I just used Nintendo as an example. We've never had any kind of console games, and that's where the really long, hard games seem to be(Nintendo, Xbox, sony ps etc).
You are correct though;you could start with any video game company. Most of them would probably be fairly ignerant about it;Probably completely unaware of the desire for accessible computer or console games.