First off, absolutely not to the one glyph for all smoothed walls. Part of the experience is smoothed walls having connectivity. And even if the glyph set was reduced, I'm not sure it would be enough. However, that should definitely be looked into as a possibility. Still, I should like to see a glyph set extended sufficiently to cover at least 1/8 of the different symbols and colours, if it is possible.
On a side note, the thought of an interactive 3-d Dwarf Fortress board greatly excites me, and I want to make one or have one made even though I am not blind. All your ideas have been extremely helpful so far, but I think if we put our heads together, we can do even better.
Also, what method is this going to use for detecting the tactile input of the user's hand? Pressure? Proximity Detecting laser grid? ( Not as impractical as it sounds, actually. The one thing is it needs to be able to tell the difference between a "click" and "scrolling over"... well actually, maybe not, if the input is still primarily handled via keyboard, as I think would be most feasible.) So, basically, what we've got so far is a pin-board that displays a variety of glyphs and detects where the user's [dominant] hand is while displaying basic information ( name, species, gender ) on a braille print-out that can be read with the other hand. That's all good and fine for static images, but one thing about DF is that you have things move a lot. Have we figured out how to track individual dwarves without sight yet? It might be important to detect more than one also. I was thinking about "sonar pings" where the distance of dwarves from your finger is represented with a ping sound that grows more faint the farther they are away. However, I don't see this as being particularly practical as the game would have to have time to "scan" and output the relativistic distance and there's still no accounting for direction. ( This is per Z-level, by the way, Z-levels being toggled by two arrow buttons marked "U" and "D" on the side of the screen in my mental design. ) One possible way to track dwarves, is to have a mandatory 50-75 dwarf population cap and have a seperate braille sector with a list of names, and different glyphs to the left of the name to represent the job and a button that acts as the "follow" command to the right. And perhaps when ones finger hovers over said list, another proximity laser grid pauses the game and brings up the information screen, displaying for the last detected dwarf ( say your finger was at the third dwarf, call him Urist, the game will pause and pull up Urist's information screen on the main panel in braille ) and then the player has to remove their hand from the list and then press ESC on their braille keyboard to resume game. I mean... it's by no means ideal, but it seems to be the most practical way that's been thought up so far for handling it.
Another issue, how does one tell the difference between a designated task and a completed whatever. I'm thinking, now this just thinking mind you, that we could use GavJ and Dorf and Dumb's idea of two different types of pins, one metal and one rubber to distinguish. Rubber pins would notate a designation, metal pins a completed product. Hmm, these are just a few ideas I've thought up, but I'm still... there are still issues. I'm gonna draw what the machine looks like in my head so that my explanation will be easier to understand.
EDIT: Major announcements like: "Migrants have arrived", "A Forgotten beast has arrived", "A Siege is upon us", and "the traders are here" will, as they do in our version, pause the game. They will also annouce themselves with a ping, and be printed out on the braille "quick info" panel. Possibly to be extended to include other announcements that the game doesn't already pause for. I'm thinking it'll also be announced with a voice following the beep and that certain announcements that the game doesn't pause for will be done by voice alone. For example, the marking of the seasons will be done by voice output from a speaker. "Spring has arrived." And thus won't be announced in the quick-info slot, as it is in the version we play. Deaths should probably also be handled as such, though I worry that during sieges the triggering of like seven death messages will overload the speakers so that they all run together into one unintelligible mush. And the Forgotten Beast announcements especially will be read out as there's no way to practically display the information for them. Also, I think that whatever resolution the pinboard operates at, it should have braille designations on the side to mark the grid. "A1", "B7", like most games with a grid. And of course, the resolution will be set. No zooming in or out, which while potentially crippling, is by far the least issue to a DF player. Still a resolution of at least 30x32 (glyphs) is not too much to ask for, I shouldn't think.
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Topic: Dwarf Fortress for the Blind. (Read 5211 times)