2007-05-30 14:53:54

I'd love to partake in most anything. Since I started gaming a few years ago, I'd wanted to get mainstream games accessible for the blind.
To me, it doesn't sound as if making vid games accessible would be an impossible task. In "The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time", I can successfully beat most of the bosses in that game using strictly Directional sound.
I don't see why they would have to add more than a bunch of sound effects, as well as an audio look and navigater function, and there you go. Sure, it might be on the shelvs 6 months later than the sighted version, but late sure beats the life out of Never!
I don't really know much about PC video games;so I can't really give suggestions as to websites. Whatever anyone comes up with, Please let us all know...

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2007-05-30 15:03:22

then we should start with strategy games. For example age of empires. O, O, that's microsoft! mmmmm. Maby warcraft then or heroes of might and magic. In strategy games there aren't mutch to do. Just add some descriptions in certain locations, add some unique hotkeys for blind users and nearly off we go. Other suggestions are also welcome.

Languages don't influence the way we think, but they still have a world and worth in themselves. Celebrate your mother tongue, the world is a diverse place.

2007-05-31 01:01:27

I think halo is more of either a "First person shooter" or an "action adventure".
The games I'd love to see made accessible more than anything are console games from nintendo;action adventure games(like zelda), and rpg games.
I'm a huge zelda fan and have wished for years that I could sit down and beat a Legend of Zelda game in it's entirety.
Surely we could engage in many different forum discussions at the same time. Gives me another idea:
If we started up on 2 or 3 of them, then we post links on each to all others we are active on. Then, we can spread ideas and suggestions from one game companies forum to another.
Power is in numbers, and though there are not a lot of us, we can probably make some kind of impact especially if we can contact blind fokes who aren't on this forum and get them involved as well.
I live in Ontario, Canada and go to a school for the blind. There are probably a couple hundred students here, and we all come from the same province. so we're not as small a population as some think.

Official server host for vgstorm.com and developer of the Manamon 2 netplay server.
PSA: sending unsolicited PMs or emails to people you don't know asking them to buy you stuff is disrespectful. You'll just be ignored, so don't waste your time.

2007-06-01 02:26:27

I hate to say this, but strategy games would be one of the hardest types to adapt. As I said previously the terrain is just so complex and dense, and you have to deal with so many different groups of units at once. I could imagine Homeworld being made fairly playable, but we would definitely not be competitive with the sighted in my opinion.

First person shooters are conversely the easiest.

cx2
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To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2007-06-01 03:56:58

I'm quite unfamiliar with stratigy games.
Do you think games like the Legend of Zelda games could be adapted?
I know we probably couldn't compete with the sighted but at least we could beat the games.

Official server host for vgstorm.com and developer of the Manamon 2 netplay server.
PSA: sending unsolicited PMs or emails to people you don't know asking them to buy you stuff is disrespectful. You'll just be ignored, so don't waste your time.

2007-06-02 01:29:38

I only have experience of a Zelda game on the old game boy, but since you're controlling a single character than I would imagine probably yes. However when it comes to the strategy games I doubt we could even beat the computer.

I think the Zelda games, if they don't have too much odd stuff in, could work similarly to audio quake *if* someone managed to adapt them.

cx2
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To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2007-06-02 02:14:41

What exactly are you calling strategy games?  If they are what I think they are, you might want to check out Ogame.  It gets boring after a while, but at least we compete equally with sighted players.

2007-06-02 03:12:21

I'm not familiar with this ogame, could you post a link please?

Strategy games as we were discussing were what the mainstream calls real time strategy games, such as Warcraft or Command and Conquer. Myself though I would be equally as happy with a similar game to any of the first 3 X-Com games or the second Master of Orion.

cx2
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To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2007-06-02 14:07:33

Hey! Warcraft is both strategic and first-person. You only controll the hero, but just upgrade stuff. I think warcraft's building section would be very easy to make accessible, but about the first-person part... not sure. Since it has a lot of maps and they're growing by each day.

2007-06-03 00:53:36

I was making reference to the first two warcraft games. If like those you even have more than one group of units to control, as I understood it led by a hero, then Warcraft 3 would still be hard.

If on the other hand you are referring to world of warcraft that is an RPG and is an entirely different kettle of fish.

cx2
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To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2007-06-03 08:48:02

No my friend is playing WC and says that there's only the hero that you'll have to controll. You make other units and they do their job automaticly. And even it's like that, you won't have more than 5/6 groups to controll, just like galaxy ranger.

2007-06-03 10:35:41

the same applies to heroes of might and magic. The hero moves along a single path and collects stuff and in combat you have to direct your minions in a restricted battlefield. It wouldn't be hard to add sounds on enemy units so that you know where to attack etc.

Languages don't influence the way we think, but they still have a world and worth in themselves. Celebrate your mother tongue, the world is a diverse place.

2007-06-03 11:46:04

Yes but the hard thing is inventing a way for controlling the hero.

2007-06-03 16:38:48

www.ogame.org is the web site for ogame.  It's a space strategy game that's fully accessible.  I got bored with it quite quickly but according to there web site millions of people play.

2007-06-03 21:13:20

A spacegame? Accessible? I should see it certainly.

2007-06-04 00:13:32

Thanks for the link, I'll check it out later.

As for Warcraft, that sounds like WC3. It is true that in theory it could be done like that, but the catch like I said is the terrain is just so varied. Imagine playing galaxy ranger on a map perhaps ten times its width and height, with certain areas you can't pass through. It *may* be just possible to adapt it, but the single player would be almost impossible to beat I believe.

Completely aside from our slower response times and taking longer to give commands is the fact that we simply can't get the big picture. You have to use the entire map to best effect. Doing this in first person is very hard indeed.

Yes Warcraft 3 has heroes, but it is more a strategy with limited RPG components. The entire premise is armies led by heroes, the important thing being that we just have too much trouble with big vast maps with obstacles. Between my time on the Battletech and Dark Legacy mud/mux games I know how hard it can be to deal with a map that is there but you know little or nothing about.

cx2
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To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2007-06-04 13:45:37

Whoops. Didn't like it.

2007-06-05 21:46:23

I agree with CX2; strategy games are the hardest to develop, mainly because the most effective way to get the most information across is through a third-person view which few audiogames have attempted (the only examples I can think of are my Duck Hunter and Troopanum's Gorbian Levels).  Galaxy Ranger made a vallient effort towards a completely emercing strategy game, but besides the weird game design decisions it's just too hard for most to imaginewhat's happening on a map that big at all times when you can only manipulate your units first-person.  I definitely found it easier to shoot the normal ships in troopanum than I found the gorbians, which leads me to believe it would be harder to portray a third-person pov using 3d sound simply because it's harder to tell exactly where everything is.  It's difficult to gage distances between objects using only sound without any environmental cues or effects.  EAX is nowhere near good enough to accurately portray this, and at this point it seems that most 3d sound systems (OpenAL, DirectSound3d etc) only accurately portray differences in X and Z mostly ignoring Y (height above the player).

James

2007-06-05 23:56:23

True, plus we are so used to measuring positions relative to our own when it comes to sound. I think it would be hard to handle measuring sounds relative to a position to our left say.

There is an outside chance something could be developed, but the ideal game type would really be turn based I feel.

cx2
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To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2007-06-07 08:50:23

And it would have to use every single key on the keyboard which would be hard to memorise.

2007-06-27 17:51:50

Hello,

I am translating to English an audiogame called SoundRTS. It's an audio realtime strategy multiplayer game which tries to borrow some of the fun of Warcraft or Starcraft. I started 2 years ago, with some breaks during this period. The english version will be ready soon (with many English errors, I'm afraid). I hope that you will find this game interesting.

2007-06-29 14:54:48

That could be interesting to see. I hope you keep us informed when it gets closer, and don't mind if we occasionally politely point out some of the english errors sometimes to help out.

cx2
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To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2007-07-02 09:39:01

Oooooh, new game good, me like. As Cx2 said, please keep us posted about the developement of the game, ---- do you have a website?

Appologies to everyone for randomly barging into this topic, but as I finally had the time to read it it looked fun.

I certainly understand the overview problem in audio games, and I do agree that stratogy games are probably the worst effected. Because of this, I actually wonder if it might be better for audio stratogy games to be developed independently, so that techniques for scanning the map and working out the locations of things can be develped.

where as in a first person shooter or turn based rpg style game, it would be possible to adapt the game relatively easily, ------ adding 3D sound and spoken messages etc, perhaps because of the extra area scanning and navigational features, stratogy games need to be more specifically developed.

also, perhaps this is a case of working out how to walk before we try running, developing stratogy games which match up to earlier and simpler main stream stratogies, rather than starting off with trying to adapt something like one of the war craft games or the recent command and conquer.

One game that comes to mind for me in this context is Dune 2 on the Amigar. This had a centralized base ala Galaxy ranger, all the units were mobile, and sinse the point of the game was mining and harvisting spice as much as destroying the enemy, a lot of it revolved around defence as much as attack and ganing teretory.

Also, the game worked on a mission basis, where you'd get a comparatively small map, have your base dropped in and were required to mine a certain amount of spice, ----- or occasionally disrupt an enemy mining operation to progress.

I also think techniques in audio scanning and navigation haven't been really explored fully yet. One idea that occurs to me for example, might be to have a grid of the map, and give you a curser to move around and see what's in each square, ----- battleship style. combine this with a message system and some good shortcuts, and I think you have the basis for a navigation system, provided that the game was slowed down to compensate, and that the player wasn't overloaded with information.

One aspect of Dune 2 that would be particularly handy from an accessibility point of view, was that you couldn't see all of the map, only those bits that your scounts had explored (the rest was black). A friend of mine said a similar system was used in red allert as will to illustrate the fact that in a real war, quite often one side doesn't know what the other is doing.

This would be handy from an accessibility point of view sinse the player could familiarize themselves with the immediate teretory around the base and go on from there (again, dune 2 being handy as it had a single, centralized base).
Personally, I really liked Galaxy ranger as a start, but I think that a lot more could be done as far as audio stratogy goes, ----- whether what could be done would ever equal what's possible in a modern stratogy game, is simply something we won't know until a good bit of developement has been done.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2007-07-02 13:56:53

The whole requirement of exploring was standard practice as I recall, in Warcraft 2 for example they also included the "fog of war" which meant you could only see the terrain in areas you had explored but hadn't anything within sight range of. In other words you can see where the water areas and mountains were, but not if the enemy had say a fleet of ships headed over.

Perhaps some work in turn based games could also be nice, recreating a basic version of the early X-Com games.

Another interesting option that occured to me just now is a sort of overview mode where you can get a feel for the whole map at a basic level, for example you swap to overview mode and it scans the map top to bottom with a pitch indicating how far it is and other sounds indicate units etc. Alternately a system where you use perhaps mouse or trackball to operate some sort of similar system, allowing you to scout out around the map quickly getting a rough idea of the information. It wouldn't be very precise, but could be enough to help.

Perhaps also the ability to lay some type of proximity sensor that would give you an alert when anything passes through a certain region might be helpful.

I entirely agree though we need to figure this out for ourselves, what the best options for interfaces might be and so on.

cx2
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To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2007-07-02 14:45:42

Hmmm, well I'm afraid I haven't heard of X.com, but I'm slightly less inthusiastic about turn based stratogy games, sinse a lot of these sorts of games are highly playable online a text versions. While this is true of rpg's as well, it seems that an Rpg would bennifit a lot from having the extra music and atmosphere which audio would provide. Also, there are aspects of rpg's (even turn based ones), which you couldn't replicate in text, ------- such as a final fantasy type thing, where you walk around in a 1st person shooter style, and have turn based combat.

I could be wrong, but I can't exactly see how these sorts of audio bennifits would work in a stratogy game?

Personally, I'd prefer a real time stratogy, even if the movement etc had to pause for navigational thype things, eg, enemy units stop moving or attacking while you perform a scan.

I like both the scan, and proximity sensors ideas. while the radars in Galaxy ranger are great, it always seemed slightly silly to me that they were so limited in area, and that you couldn't attack something while you had the radar going. Because of the radar problems, I've never actually been able to attack an enemy force before it reaches the defences around mine, sinse the radars are so short range and impricise, and cannot be used while moving.

Audio scans is also a good idea, especially if they were combined with other navigational features such as shorter, more selective scans. In general I don't actually understand why more companies don't use them. thus far only Draconis and gma seem to have.

Perhaps even reasonable amounts of explanation would work, asusmin the scans are good enough, ----- the use of the scouts is one thing I thought really did! work in Galaxy ranger.

Perhaps using detail of scans, messages and coordinate reports ala battleship, you could even emulate something like the Fog of war, ----- which is apparently a fairly major part of red allert as well (I remembered it, sinse it had such a good name).

The main problem though, stil comes down to a lack of programmers and sources and funds. . And now we're back on familiar teretory once again.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)