Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Dirst]

It is possible for DFHack to know what screen is displayed and pipe the information on that screen to the DFHack console or a file or any application that accepts streams.

When you hit create new world, it would be something like the following.  At any point in this menu, you can hit "escape" to abort or "y" to start generating.

Please wait.
World size: Medium.
(Down)
History: Medium.
(Left)
History: Short.
(Down)
Number of Civilizations: Medium.
(Down)
Maximum Number of Sites: Medium.
(Down)
Number of Beasts: Medium.
(Right)
Number of Beasts: High.
(Down)
Natural Savagery: Medium.
(Down)
Mineral Occurrence: Sparse.
(Right)
Mineral Occurrence: Frequent.
(y)

Like I said, just about the entire game can be put in a text format.  It's the map that gives me pause.

To start, we can certainly simplify the menagerie of stuff in the game with a small handful of types for each thing.  One or two materials of each type, one or two domestic creatures, and so on, just to work the kinks out of the interface without overwhelming the playtesters.

[AbsIe]

...it's when you think about removing material types or whatever I get wary.

I wouldn't worry about removing material types changing much gameplay wise, there are SO MANY different materials that their sheer number makes them cumbersome to process. What happens in the mods is instead of displaying "limonite" or "magnetite," they display "iron ore" and all regular stone is called "stone" and all flux stones are called "flux stone." The only visible difference between many materials (especially stone) during gameplay is the colour. Weight also varies slightly, but not so much that dwarf travel time is massively changed.
tl;dr: Don't worry about removing materials, there's too many anyway and the rocks don't matter unless you're a geologist.

[zkline]

In that case, I withdraw my objections You have a point about making something I can easily playtest.

[chevil]

This is some amazing stuff we have here.

Bay12 is a awesomely weird place. Puppy falls in dwarf mode and DFblind in general discussion.

[birdy51]

Hrmm. A thought. As I understand it, something that could have issues that come up is that DF also has vertical levels as well as horizontal levels. But then I had a thought. Some rather fascinating shenanigans still went down in the earliest, albeit simpler days of DF(Boatmurder) Taking one of those builds as something to work off of might eliminate some of the difficulty of the current build.

Merp. Speculation.

[zkline]

I don't think the vertical levels are as troublesome as all that… It's a simple enough concept for me to grasp, perhaps surprisingly. I think of it kind of like a camera, for lack of a better way to put it, looking at portions of, say, a hill or what have you. As I understand it, you have to build connected stairways or ramps to travel between levels anyway.

I'm not discounting Boatmurdered. I loved reading that even if I couldn't see the screenshots, I just hope we can work from something more recent.

[mnjiman]

To correctly make Dwarf Fortress Blind accessible, the proper technology would have to be used to both allow the player to communicate to the game, have the game communicate to them, allow a non confusing way to understand what is happening in the game, and allow the player to make changes in the game ALL at the same time.

I think using a Refreshable Braille Display (though expensive) could allow for a better way to reference what is currently happening in the game during pausing. You do need to know what you have done and have not done... and pausing the game should allow you as the player to take in more information. This would allow the player to see what their fortress currently looks like, to feel what is currently where... and give some mental perspective with what is occurring. Since DF is all text based, it should be theoretically possible.

Going forward with more theory... it would be nice if someone invented a magnetic metal pad, with separated cells, that instead of raising off the pad mechanically... could raise and provide vibration through magnetics. If the pad cells were filled with a Ferrofluid, the fluid could form small circles depending on on a metal pad below. The magnetic field would have to be very well, and its likely the ferrofluid would have to be responsive more so to certain levels of vibration to help with the magnetic containment.

[Miuramir]

This is a more specific case of what is sometimes described as "decluttering".  In human factors research, it's well known that when people are under stress (such as fighter pilots who are being shot at), they need an interface that is aggressively streamlined to just the minimum information they need to do the job at hand. 

It is sometimes useful to talk about the bandwidth of an interface.  The human visual system is by far the highest bandwidth interface a standard person has, easily capable of distinguishing two spatial dimensions (X: left-right, Y: up-down) and depending on definition, one to three colorimetric dimensions, with partial/synthetic information on a third spatial dimension (depth), and a temporal dimension (the "optical flow" analysis built into our wetware is quite sophisticated). 

Audio is usually considered the second highest bandwidth; it has partial / synthetic information on two spatial dimensions (radial and elevation, loosely), intensity (which may or may not reflect distance), "color" (tone), and some better temporal processing, including some fairly interesting waveform processing that allows us to perceive harmonics, beat frequencies, and the like. 

So, Dwarf Fortress has a famously cluttered interface.  On the one hand, we want to dramatically pare down the information it tries to present; on the other hand, we want to present the crucial information in as usable a fashion as possible. 

For the first, as noted already there are mods designed to reduce the internal variety that doesn't directly affect game play.  For example, instead of a bin containing 3 dog leather, 5 naked mole rat leather, 1 bat leather and so on, these mods simplify the raw files so there is only one (or very few) sorts of leather; the bin might simply say 26 leather, which would take a screen reader far less time to read off.  These are usually designed for people on low-memory computers, but should be adaptable for your purposes. 

There are also settings in the init files which will help, such as not randomly varying the tiles used for the ground; personally, I find that looks cluttered even with good eyesight and turn it off. 

From the other perspective... it seems logical that the fast way to scroll around would need to have a preview that is tone based.  Perhaps a scale that ran from low pitch tones to high pitch tones something like the following:
* Open space
* Water
* Grass, dirt, snow, and other natural floors
* Rough stone floor
* Smoothed stone floor
* Engraved stone floor
* Solid dirt
* Solid ordinary stone
* Solid flux
* Solid ore
* Building, construction, etc.
* Your dwarves
* Tame / trained animal
* Traders, guards, etc.
* Wild animals
* Hostile mundane forces
* Megabeasts, necromancers, forgotten beasts, and other special problems
* Magma

Ideally the interface would allow you to quickly scroll around the map, listening to the tones, and then pause the cursor when you got where you were going; the tone would fade over a second or so, and then read the contents of the square to you.  This would allow such activities as exploring the edge of a river or cliff audibly, and particularly aid in finding things that are significantly different than their surroundings. 

So, instead of it having to read out loud:
Grass.  Grass.  Grass.  Sandy Loam.  Grass. Yak.  Grass.  Goblin Archer. 
you might have:
do do do re do fa do ti

If you were interested in a dual-tone systems, either left vs. right ear, or as two-tone chords, you could do some more sophisticated discrimination, possibly combined with octaves.  Perhaps the left ear could play a tone based on the floor type, and the right ear play a tone based on what the tile was occupied by (air, stone, goblin, barrel of booze, whatever) ; in the case of solid stone, they would be the same. 

I'm not the right sort of expert to design the "audio browser" software, but I don't think there's any fundamental reason it couldn't be done, and DFhack may already include most of the software hooks that would be needed.  Or possibly, and somewhat ironically, 3D viewers such as stonesense; the underlying task of taking the Dwarf Fortress screen info and presenting it in a different medium is similar.  (You could even look at it as a 1D viewer.) 

[mnjiman]

Great idea. It would be awesome if you could have that and somehow put the screen into braille >.>

[zkline]

That theoretical discussion was superb, Miuramir. Thanks for outlining things…

Unfortunately I'm not an expert of any sort. I can provide feedback on anything someone might be willing to slap together, but I don't know enough about DF or audio  to do much myself. I've thought about looking at the DFHack API to see if I can do anything, but am not sure how friendly that would be to someone who hasn't written a substantial program before.

So I hope we can find someone who either has such experience already, or is willing to experiment. I wish I had more substantive ideas to offer, but I'm afraid I'm fresh out right now. I have faith that something can be done, though.

I appreciate the enthusiasm and interest shown by everybody on these boards. Thank you, Bay12.

[Harken]

I would love to help with this and get you in the game but I don't have the technical background to really contribute much.
It is good though to see the DF community coming out with so many ideas and suggestions.

[mifki]

Currently least clear for me is how to implement map navigation. This is directly related to the question, how much information you can keep in your head, and how your "current position" should be represented - as absolute coordinates, ie. currently you're at (30,11), and you remember that main entrance is at (14, 20) and so on. Or relatively - you press a key and hear "your base is north-west 10 tiles, gold ore is to the east" (you first define such landmarks). Or maybe something else, well, I never tried to play with my eyes closed and to remember where is everything, so probably you have better understanding here. Small and micro embark areas are possible but that's still a lot of tiles, and even more z-levels.

Currently I'm working on a project not directly related to this topic, but which will greatly help here as well when finished. I can't tell more at the moment, but anyway the map and navigation is the most difficult part to do.

[Dirst]

The problem with Dwarf Fortress's map is that it is very dense.  Even a simple flat outside area is a mixture of grass tiles, shrub tiles, trees, and boulders.

So having each type of tile emit a sound from its location is just going to be an awful lot of noise on a twenty-by-twenty map.  Reporting one tile at a time won't work either because individual items you need to place can be up to five-by-five tiles.

I think it might be possible to have an adjustable "hearing range" around the cursor.  That allows for sweeping large areas to search for tiles that are different, then focusing down in cluttered areas.

I thought it might be helpful to be able to filter out specific sounds on the fly, such as toggling off the sound for floor tiles.  That could get confusing unless the settings were very obvious such as on a Braille board.  Having the toggle simply lower the volume of that type might work better, but I have no experience with using this kind of interface.

I would not worry about getting lost in the map.  The game already supporters assigning function keys to specific locations, and there is already a clunky system for putting a note on a tile.  A hotkey to report coordinates would be easy as well.

[Scoops Novel]

To correctly make Dwarf Fortress Blind accessible, the proper technology would have to be used to both allow the player to communicate to the game, have the game communicate to them, allow a non confusing way to understand what is happening in the game, and allow the player to make changes in the game ALL at the same time.

I think using a Refreshable Braille Display (though expensive) could allow for a better way to reference what is currently happening in the game during pausing. You do need to know what you have done and have not done... and pausing the game should allow you as the player to take in more information. This would allow the player to see what their fortress currently looks like, to feel what is currently where... and give some mental perspective with what is occurring. Since DF is all text based, it should be theoretically possible.

That's what i had in mind. There are limited characters on such a keyboard, but the hierarchical layering of symbols under broad situational categories could help. Still, if it is beyond reach of most blind people we're back to square one, and i admit it's not by itself a elegant solution.

[zkline]

Sadly, even if a cheaper display were available, you need a screen reader to  interface with them, typically. The way most of them do it is braille what's spoken, with custom support for special cases sometimes. It's more trouble than it's worth I'm afraid.

That being said, I'm intrigued by your secretiveness, mifki. I wish you every success with whatever this project is.