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[GavJ]

I'm not sure what you mean by the grid limit/think i mean.

I mean that a physical heat producing device, in any one viewpoint (not scrolling), you would only be able to sense about 10-20 distinct areas in space of different heats, before it got too close for your nerves to tell the difference.

Yes, you can then scroll to another part of the map. But imagine playing dwarf fortress with only a 10x10 grid view of the map at any one point. That would be HORRIBLY annoying. You'd have no idea what was going on 90% of the time. And then some guy looks at you confused when you say so and says "But dude, you can just scroll, lol."



^
Tons of fun

[Scoops Novel]

What about abstracting it out? Go for symbols for "item", "fluid", rock rather then all the details. You'd have to look at everything even further then you do now, but it would be playable. Oh, and look what i found.

http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2012/10/episode-48-designing-for-visually.html

[alfie275]

What may be more feasible would be a wrapper, similar to dwarf therapist, that takes care of the low level stuff. Eg you can instruct it to build bedrooms, and it uses some template to place the correct tiles so the player does not have to actually deal with the positioning of items etc.
It could also do stuff like read out the event log with a text-to-speech system and provide overviews every month.

It would make the game more abstract, leaving the player able to concentrate on high-level decision making without having to worry about cursor placement or seeing everything on the screen.

[GavJ]

Those both sound like reasonable solutions.

The "add a bunch of AI for little stuff" seems like it might have the unintended side effect, though, of encouraging a bunch of 12 year old minecraft types to flood the community and be annoying due to leveraging the system intended for the blind as more of an "easy mode" for those who can see. Which is probably pretty undesirable.

Also much more work than what is effectively just a special tileset. But at the same time, certainly more useful sounding for blind people.

[DG]

There was a thread started by zkline in General Discussion on alternative interfaces for blind players. Bonus points because zkline is blind.

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=90229.0

 

[GavJ]

From that thread, discussing that same idea of a wrapper AI:

"You are standing in a field, surrounded by plump helmets.  There is a small wooden house to your north and another to your northwest, a hill to your east, and a vulture above you.  The sun is high in the sky."
attack vulture
"You cannot reach the vulture"
throw dagger at vulture
"The spinning dagger strikes the vulture in the head, and the severed part flies off in an arc!  The vulture has been struck down.  The vulture corpse falls a moderate distance to the ground."
pick up dagger
"You pick up your dagger"
butcher vulture corpse with dagger
"You butcher the vulture corpse.  You see [insert long list of parts here]"
Pick up all vulture parts
"You pick up [same list of parts]"
Go to house
"Which house?  There is a house to your north, and to your northwest."
Go to north house

When I actually see it written out like that, it seems not very feasible. Everything above could be coded probably reasonably easily.  But just the way adventure mode works, it would play out more like:

"You are standing in a field, surrounded by plump helmets.  There is a small wooden house to your north and another to your northwest, a hill to your east, and a vulture above you.  The sun is high in the sky."
attack vulture
"You cannot reach the vulture"
throw dagger at vulture
"The spinning dagger strikes the vulture in the wing, bruising the fat! The vulture begins moving toward you. Six vultures appear from around the corner and begin moving toward you."
run away
"You run away. The vultures are gaining on you."
drop everything and run faster dammit!
"You drop your equipment, but the vultures still gain on you. You come up against a river."
"dive in the river"
"You dive into the river, safe for the moment from the vultures. A carp rips off your leg."
Oh god, turn around, take my chances with the vultures!
"You pull yourself onto the shore. You are feeling faint. Just then, goblin bandits jump out from behind the bushes!"
punch a goblin's foot ineffectively
"You are torn apart, and the goblins and vultures have a picnic, throwing scraps to the carp. They make up a good song about it. You have been struck down."

Where a seeing player might have danced aroud the exact optimal tiles to run behind some tree in time, checking the precise vision cones every step to cheaply go into sneak mode and escape, for instance.

[Dorf and Dumb]

Not blind so I don't know, but what I'm thinking would be optimal is:

Begin with the MIT version of a Pinscreen, with actuators: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3021522/innovation-by-design/mit-invents-a-shapeshifting-display-you-can-reach-through-and-touch

But hopefully they will develop much higher resolution versions than the one shown!

Optionally, have some degree of local heat, electric current, and/or simply a strip running across the end of each actuator which can be moved one way or the other to deliver a variety of different textures (sandpapery, slick, gummy, etc)

With these pins, you can represent many different rock types, and more generally, symbols, in a way that a person can quite rapidly scan across.

ADDITIONALLY, there should be a stereo or better sound output that responds directly to the touch of the person on the pinscreen.  When you touch a pin of any given type, in proportion to the pressure you apply, there is a sound emitted by the speakers to match it.  The sounds differ not only in tone but in texture - you can tell the difference between a tuba and a fiddle note.  When a broad area is touched all the component notes are played, so you can wave your hand across the sand looking for a gem in it.

Last but not least, the touch on the pinscreen triggers a search for nearby features.  So if you are touching 30 squares away from a goblin, "goblin" is softly spoken over the other noises, with the direction on the speakers signifying which way it is from the touch.  As you come closer it gets louder until it's at full speaking volume when you're on it.  Multiple monsters lead to superimposed sounds again, but I'm hoping that by darting fingers this way and that they can be deciphered quickly.

I desire this of course as a general solution for any screen, not just DF, with which of these features are used being configurable for any given character.

I think it would be really, really cool if Toady could get together with the MIT inventors and one of the funding organizations listed in this discussion previously, and try to seriously write this up as a charity project seeking additional outside funding.

[GavJ]

gummy texture

*raise eyebrow*

That's some crazy awesome stuff, though. I like the sound mosaic idea (goblin spoken softly when goblins are far away). Not sure how annoying it would get, but it reminds me of some sort of a cross between Bilbo Baggins' sword and the intro to a RadioLab episode.

[CaptainMcClellan]

Not blind so I don't know, but what I'm thinking would be optimal is:

Begin with the MIT version of a Pinscreen, with actuators: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3021522/innovation-by-design/mit-invents-a-shapeshifting-display-you-can-reach-through-and-touch

But hopefully they will develop much higher resolution versions than the one shown!

Optionally, have some degree of local heat, electric current, and/or simply a strip running across the end of each actuator which can be moved one way or the other to deliver a variety of different textures (sandpapery, slick, gummy, etc)

With these pins, you can represent many different rock types, and more generally, symbols, in a way that a person can quite rapidly scan across.

ADDITIONALLY, there should be a stereo or better sound output that responds directly to the touch of the person on the pinscreen.  When you touch a pin of any given type, in proportion to the pressure you apply, there is a sound emitted by the speakers to match it.  The sounds differ not only in tone but in texture - you can tell the difference between a tuba and a fiddle note.  When a broad area is touched all the component notes are played, so you can wave your hand across the sand looking for a gem in it.

Last but not least, the touch on the pinscreen triggers a search for nearby features.  So if you are touching 30 squares away from a goblin, "goblin" is softly spoken over the other noises, with the direction on the speakers signifying which way it is from the touch.  As you come closer it gets louder until it's at full speaking volume when you're on it.  Multiple monsters lead to superimposed sounds again, but I'm hoping that by darting fingers this way and that they can be deciphered quickly.

I desire this of course as a general solution for any screen, not just DF, with which of these features are used being configurable for any given character.

I think it would be really, really cool if Toady could get together with the MIT inventors and one of the funding organizations listed in this discussion previously, and try to seriously write this up as a charity project seeking additional outside funding.

Yes! Thank you for like... taking my idea and finding somewhere it actually already exists!

And yea, that really would be cool if we could get Toady to team up with the people at MIT. Matter o' fact, we might be able to.

As per GavJ, my goal here is to make fortress mode feasible for the visually impaired, not just adventure mode, but the ideas you have given for that sound pretty good also.

[Dorf and Dumb]

gummy texture

*raise eyebrow*

I'll admit the idea for the texture strip is a little out there.  I have no intuitive idea whether, when you put them in little squares, a blind person could recognize just a few textures or thousands.  I'm thinking of it mostly as a way to try to increase the resolution without actually increasing the resolution.  I mean, in theory you could have one pin per pixel on the video monitor, and the reader could feel letters directly by whether pins are in one of two positions, but that's a lot of pins.  Or you could have an array of large squares covered by textures (even a flat array with no actuators except to pull strips over individual squares) and the person might be able to feel this texture is an A, that one a Z.  But I don't really believe either of these is very feasible (one because of the fabrication involved, one by what people can feel), so I'm hoping you can strike an average, then lump in more features combinatorially until you get something useful.

The other question is how far the pins should be able to go up and down.  In theory, just two positions a millimeter apart should be enough to feel a black-and-white pattern... I think?  On the other hand that cute MIT prototype makes me think you could program the entire landscape so a blind person could feel how the DF world is in 3D.

For a true 3D DF display for the blind:  Though what to do about the hidden layers is an issue... I'm picturing, what if the pins could feel when you drag them in one of four cardinal directions?  Then, say, you could define pushing a pin "downward" (i.e. down arrow on a video screen, rather than pushing it down into the device) to mean that you want to look at the 3D layer just under the layer that pin is at.  So all the pins on the device withdraw to one level less than the pin you pushed was at, and reset their textures and any braille patterns they might or might not have the resolution to offer to correspond to the 2D map at that Z-level only.  But the ones lower than that remain 3D.  Push a pin "up" on the screen, and the cut is moved up one Z-level, so any pins that correspond to positions that go up higher than that move up.  If you are pushing toward a mountainside, it should be possible to let your fingers ride up with the pins, sliding along from one to the next, until the effect of pushing the first pin down is undone.

Whatever kind of display, it should be possible for it to interpret single clicks and double clicks by tapping on the pins at a given spot., in addition to the effect of a gentle pressure as I described last post.

Anyway, getting back to the texture strip: this is limited in that the textures have to be really durable, even though the strip would bend nearly 90 degrees at each side of the tip, and be pulled around the tip with every single change of display.  That's a lot of wear and tear so they really really gotta be made out of good durable stuff.  That's another reason why you might not be able to have many textures.  I suppose that if you just have two or four textures or so you could arrange it with some sort of simple swivel mechanism behind the head that wouldn't require any flexing.  When feasible the existing textures should be different colors so a sighted person can conveniently troubleshoot, or if he starts to envy those 3D scenes, play with them himself.

[GavJ]

I think textures you could make with hundreds of little pins is a fine idea. I'm sure you could distinguish at least a couple dozen, maybe way more, almost instantly. "nubbly" vs. "horizontal ridges" vs. "vertical ridges" vs. "wavy" vs. "smooth" vs. blah blah.

Was only raising my eyebrow at GUMMY in particular sounds gross. Also sounds logistically insane to actually try and secrete chemicals temporarily to do stuff like gumminess. Think you probably would need to stick to just what a set of small pins could make.

[Dorf and Dumb]

Well, by "gummy" I was thinking of something that could be made with silicone similar to one of those rubber (well, silicone) bracelets.  They seem pretty durable.

[GavJ]

Oh perhaps you could have two sided pins or something, so that you can have all those ridged or nubbly or whatever textures, either in steel or in silicone, to double the number of glyphs.

Sounds like a lot more moving parts though, easier to break.

Or maybe every other pin is silicone or steel, and it selects mixtures, with no extra moving parts.

[CaptainMcClellan]

Something I thought of... I was reading this thing about new advances in prosthetic limbs, and how they were able to provide some sensory feed-back through means of vibrating pins that activated rerouted nerves in the nub of the missing limb. Perhaps something similar, though uniquely adapted to the situation, could be used. That is, achieving different feelings by having the pins vibrate at different speeds, and possibly use that as an analog for texture or colour. Also, I can picture GavJ's idea rather well, but still that brings up the problem that an earlier poster mentioned of still having insufficient glyphs to represent all of Dwarf Fortress due to colour. And if one were to individually heat the pins, as I had planned, I realize that would create too "muddy" a picture, as one might be picking up heat from adjacent pins, not the ones upon which their fingers lie. Still, with a greater heat difference that could be used also to double the amount of glyphs one can display. I dunno. I like what GavJ said, but it's still too limited.

[GavJ]

You don't need as many glyphs as DF has, as somebody else pointed out. Like, you can have just one for all grass, for instance. One for all trees. One for all farmable ground, another for all rock.  You can lump tons of inconsequential animals together into a single glyph (one for capybaras and giraffes and benign things. One for all animal men. One for aggressive or dangerous fauna but not actively seeking you out. Another for active hostiles like GCS or yetis, trolls and such. One for all FBs and titans. etc.). To get more info you can ping them for more, but most of the time these are enough to be able to safely gloss over, is the idea.

All smooth or constructed walls could be one glyph, regardless of direction... same for tracks. On and on.

I'm too lazy to actually go come up with a set of abbreviated needs just for the sake of a hypothetical forum thread, but you could if you wanted. The resulting number might be pretty reasonable.  Like, around 100 or so?  Or it might still be huge, I'm not sure.