Hi sic.
Well  I had a slightly better time playing the game, I managed to navigate round sort of and was able to blast a few enemies, so its a little better.
I was able to kill at least 7 beffore I died.
Sadly its not quite there yet.
Its on the way but not quite.
I can tell what sfx is an enemy but I don't always clear it eventually I die.
I still can't get through the first level at all.
Now if you are going to remove the mode I guess you will have to refund all the people that invested in the game to make it accessable and I am one of those people.
From playing the game, you are progressing, and I urge you to keep going, I Have no idea what sounds woould go where but maybe people could dgive sounds for things I am not sure if then it would even work as such.

I have yet to purchase the game, but a suggestion that could help...
In our community, most games like these have an object viewer.
In activating it, you can get a list of the objects that are important. This may include doors, enemies, items, and anything you may think might be important.
One game in particular, if you look quickly enough, will allow you to track down flying bullets as they sore through the air!
Also, this started out with bk III, where you pressed and held g, that allowed you to pan a camera around. Think of it as kind of like the camera in the Mario titles.
You could see walls, platforms, and where there wasn't a platform you could tell it was not safe to jump, or if there was a gap between platforms, how far you would have to jump to clear it.
And guys, can we please not be so harsh on this guy? He's a mainstream dev who is just beginning to put in experimental audio support.
Those are my thoughts and suggestions.

Why am I subscribed if I don't get notifications anyway?

So for the record, it seems I was right on the clutter thing after all. Sadly, this viewport is indeed tiny and that makes it awfully hard to see enemies in time. But yeah, if somebody knows how to work around this, that may make this mode more usable, at least until a better alternative can be developed.

Yeah, I will refund anybody who wants it, just make sure to explicitly contact me (http://www.azurasun.com/contact). I'm still not sure what I'm going to do, it all depends on how things pan out yet.

Can you give me more details?

For the record, this new version (1.22) does it vertically with up and down. I dunno how to make it work with left and right though, since those make you run and that would be problematic. Can anybody suggest what keys could be used that are less likely to get in the way?

Eh, I'd prefer people to be blunt and harsh, that's the only way I can measure if this is actually working

Well, if you think that could help, sure. Again, get in contact with me.

Hello;

This is not a good idea since it will slow down game play a lot and will not really feel like a game. I'd consider dropping the project. You tried and that was awesome but perhaps this game just isn't meant for audio alone.

@SIK
I wouldn't say drop the project, but I also wouldn't advise you even attempting this method.  There is one simple reason that I believe Brad never considered and that is the issue of the keys interrupting the screen reader.

Since screen readers accept input from keys at all times (pretty much, but correct me if I'm wrong), if you're holding down a key and it's triggered to speak, the speech will not even register as having spoken.  The end result?  No speech.  I'd say just have a dounf ro gaps, have sounds when you run into a wall - you don't have to know where a wall is - you can just run into it and find your way from there.

Just my opinion in this current situation.  I like what you're doing, keep at it.

The best example to look at would be swamp - when you are holding down the walking keys, there are interrupted messages etc.

I wouldn't mind if someone comes in here and corrects me/gives a better suggestion on how to correct/resolve the issue, on either end.

Sorry I can't be of more help.

I really should get around to trying this game...
Anyway, as far as preventing speech getting interrupted, this is easy to fix on the screen reader side as most screen readers have options to turn this off, or at least JAWS and NVDA do. In the case of NVDA, you can do this in the keyboard settings dialog, speech interrupt for enter key and speech interrupt for typed characters. Unchecking them will prevent this from happening and the configuration can be saved into a configuration profile so that it's only active in the game

Thanks.

(warning: rant ahead, skip two paragraphs)

Not going to abandon it, but the sound engine annoys me. The problem is this: sound effects are grouped into categories (player sounds, item sounds, enemy sounds, etc.), and it can play only one of each at a time. This was done as a way to prevent overloading from the same sound playing too often (something common in platformers) but in the end Sol didn't end up having this issue. Instead, now it's being a hindrance to these kind of suggestions as they require being able to play the same sound effects several times, and each of those instances being processed separately. The sonar is rendered separately on its own mixer rather than through sound effects (hence why it uses beeps: it doesn't even touch the OGG files).

I now have new sound code that doesn't have this issue but it's on a different game engine altogether and backporting it wouldn't be easy since it depends on some other facilities (mostly dealing with low-level stuff like memory allocation and text processing). The idea is ultimately to port the whole game over to it, but that will take a long while, hence why I'm looking for quick hacks I can implement in the old engine instead but so far all seem rather bad. This is what's getting me annoyed.

(rant over)

Anyway, maybe I should try this idea anyway. Thinking about this, if I were to use sound effects instead of the screen reader, most of this code would be the same anyway save for a few lines, so either way the effort would be worth it, right? (but I need to figure out where to get suitable sound effects then)

But it (each step) goes unhearable after like 0.1 seconds... (I still need to change it though, I assumed a kick drum would sound like a shoe on a hard floor, but people think otherwise)

I've made a number of posts the past while in the Developer section linking to a ton of royalty free/free sound samples from various sources that might help, here, here, and here.

To be fair, nearly all of those beeps come from the sonar and most (almost all) of them are those level clues I'm trying to replace with this The rest of the sound effects are not even remotely as beepy (certain cheat aside).

If you're curious to see what I mean and want to hear the sound effects on their own, the soledad.dat file can be opened with 7-zip, inside the sounds folder there are a lot of OGG files which are the sound effects. I actually just documented that today, in fact.