I think that this subject is important because not many people talk about it, but the visualizations of senses is important to people who don’t have a setup in where they can use electronic simulation of the sense, or people with disabilities, because if I cant hear then I wont be able to use sound for sound and I will need a substitute, of course I have 5 working senses, but someone could come across this problem not to mention when an in game sense is better then in a human, or senses we don’t have.
7 Likes
Quick stroll through the dev blog, and I’m not seeing much for disability support per say, there was some discussion on how senses were to be handled, with some quick mockups of what it would be like in game here. Granted, there’s probably some info in the earlier dev forums that I am unaware of (sad that I missed out on this earlier) but it looks like there is a general consensus on allowing flexibility of senses.
Some actual discussion on how to support disabilities would be nice, and it would make, even for those without a disability, an option for more game-play - Thrive would be interesting when played almost completely without sight, for example.
So, here’s throwing my hat in the ring with ideas, given what I’ve read:
-
Eins → Full nonvisual sense replacement: More than likely a fair bit of work, allowing the player to use any sense as their main. We already have some work being put into this now, though for the most part, looks like it’s been towards porting sound and smell to visual options, which would cover hearing loss fairly well on it’s own as an option.
-
Zwei → Color Blindness and Partial Vision Impairments: Vision impairment would vary, I have a friend who has color blindness (red/green) that I’ll need to go bug about how he manages, but I know in some cases a color filter could work and would be a simple solution. Moving on… it would depend on how common software to support said issues is, and whether we could integrate something similar into the game. IF it is as simple as a color filter, we could probably just add an option in the graphics tab, though I need to do some research on that before I can say anything definitively…
-
Drei → As you go further towards blindness it would get significantly harder: while gameplay in and of itself could be modeled just via an audio setup, actual editing would be significantly harder. Maybe have it so there’s a setting for voice descriptions on all the different parts? Hmmmm… Probably take quite a bit of support, especially as we get further on into the game, but at the same time it would be interesting to have the option to play without a screen entirely. Thrive Challenge run anyone?
This is probably not at exhaustive list, but my thoughts on things we could do and ideas on what to research for disability support. Thoughts welcome!
EDIT So, I completely forgot this was on community forums, but there was some ideas on this thread for hearing and echolochation options.
2 Likes
Yeah I was checking to see if anyone had mentioned that thread or if I was going to have to be less lazy and find it.
I’ve heard that you can’t give out visual to every sense or else it will become difficoultous to see anything, but that could be fixed by using different “modes” that make you visualize different senses?
I was thinking something like a priority list so maybe the top 3 or 2 would be visual and the ones down the list will only appear if your creature doesn’t have a sense higher on the list as for disability support I’m clueless and that is a reason why I made this thread
yes, but animals usually have more than 3 senses (and use them all, even minors one)
so a system that has “modes” bound to hotkeys (like 1, 2, 3 etc) that can be customizable (es. I add to mode 1 smell and the sense that makes you sense magnetic fields) in my opinion makes more sense (pun not intended). Maybe the major senses could be constantly visualized and only have minor senses in the “modes”?
2 Likes
yeah that’s also a cool idea ill give you credit
1 Like
So, there was also some talk here about electroreception and I think some on magnetoreception later on in the thread, if you want to see some talk that’s already occurred.
I rather like that idea though, and it lets you filter down senses you still use for specific purposes while reducing the clutter otherwise.
2 Likes