Hi ALl,
I felt that things were sufficiently far along on this project for me to mention it on the forum here, though I don't have an official release for people to enjoy quite yet.
Once upon a time, I was working on making a completely new kind of game accessible for us. For people who aren't aware, Battletech is a turn-based tactical game, centered around giant mechs/robots and the warriors who pilot them. It has a whole elaborate fictional history, and has existed in one form or another since the 80s. I stopped work for a while, but am back to it now.
There is an open-source version of the tabletop game called Megamek, and that is the version of this game I've been working on. It's written in the Java programming language, and is generally straight-forward, code-wise.
So where do things stand at the moment? There is a basic command line interface set up, which allows you to move ground units, fire weapons, and get unit status info. There is a 95% accessible graphical UI for the rest of the game, including scenario setup, army creation, and so forth.
The biggest problem at the moment is figuring out how to handle the hex map. The game is designed so that it's drawn visually, and at the moment we're limited to asking about individual tiles one at a time, or at most a few at a time. I don't really have a great solution for this problem, though I'm sure one exists if I poke at it a bit. Any Java programmers who happen to frequent this forum, I'd love to hear from you.
What can we do in the game so far? I've brought it to a point where we can play a multiplayer or single-player game, with some difficulty, including units such as mechs and infantry but nothing air or space-based quite yet. There are a few miscellaneous things I should possibly code text commands for, but these should be fairly straight-forward. The hex map is the most difficult part of the entire enterprise, as it's more a conceptual problem than a straight-forward coding issue. The commands that exist are entered in a separate "Accessibility window," available from the view menu. All of them begin with a "#," character, except for one, which is used to select arbitrary hexes, though I should probably convert that over to match just for consistency.
I hope that the game will become officially accessible at some point in the near future, even if only via the text commands. My ultimate goal would be to make the graphical interface fully useable as well, but that's a slightly harder problem.
Still, I thought i should at least share news of the current progress and let everybody know at long last what I've been up to. There's nothing like Battletech available for the blind, and I really hope people can enjoy it soon.
The accessibility support has been integrated into the main repository, at https://github.com/megamek/megamek.git
Any help would be appreciated as I get re-acquainted with this project.