Wow, when I read about this I just had to register as a user. Hey all!
I am no programer, but I find things like this intrigin. Being able to play DF blind won't be an easy task, but after reading I might have a suggestion.
When I first heard your problem I thought "How to do this?" My first thought was of Lego. But having someone build you a lego model of every z-level in
DF would be kinda of insane. Not to mention it had to be updated every "tick".
Alot of people have been going on the sound way of doing things, me I googled the Braille board and think I have a solution.
Now be warned, as I said I am no programmer so I can't help you make the program, but from what I read it can display about 40 characters and
uses a 128-bit interface.
Dwarf fortress uses extended ascii, wich is is alot more, BUT, there is the graphical tile set. Nobody said it had to display small
images of dwarfs, nor that it had to display more then 128 diffrent items, even if there are alot more.
Now before I ramble to long, let me ask you, how does your Braille board display its text? Is it 1 row 40 charecters or is it more like
4 times 10? Since you can't see whats comming I will give an example, I take for granted that if you highlight a piece of text it will be able to display it.
So for example:
A B C B A *newline
B C A C B *newline
C A B A C *newline
B C A C B *newline
C A B A C *newline
End example.
Could it display this, or something simular to it? It might not be a lego model, but you should be able to "get a feel" for the fortress this way.
As long the Braille board displays two rows or more of text it should be doable, hard, but not impossible.
Now once we know if it could display a 10 by 2, 10 by 3 or even better a 8 by 5 area we will be cooking with charcoal.
I head that a couple of years ago someone developed a bot for fishing in world of warcraft. The metod it used was that it scaned the screen for
the float and then monitored it, and once there was a bite it clicked it and pulled it in. My thought is to develope a program that uses a tileset and then displays it
on the brille board. Now what about menus and the like I hear people ask... wait for it.
Also what about the fact that there is over 100 diffrent types of rock? Thats is what we are going to solve first.
A tileset i basicly a 8 by 16, or something like that, pixels of information. First, color code the first pixel... (ehh, just figured you probably don't have a clue what colors are, so when I mention colors please think of shaped like triangle or circle or the like instead.)
First color code the first pixel, lets say Red. That means that every tile on the screen will form a grid, this would be used to sync the program to your display. After that put in a color for each typ of tile, animal/dwarf/craft/stone. By hotkeying these you could filter out alot of information. The brille board will display something like:
G for grass, U for unit and C for crafts. Once you find something you can hit the hotkey and get more detailed information. Example you find an area that is S S S S S and the next row is the same only lowcaps s s s s s. Hmm, just figured I don't know if a board can display big and small cap, ANYWAYS, the next row could be F F F F F instead. S for Stone and F for floor. You now know that you have floor tiles and to the north of them you have a stonewall. Pressing the hotkey for stones. The first row, S S S S S. Would change to G B L O E. Wich would translate to something like Gold, brtium, lignite, ortheclas and galena.
You will only be able to "see" 40 tiles at a time of your fortress, but I it is the best I can come up with. Oh and even if DF shows extended ascii, there is nothing that says that the tileset can't have the same image for 2 diffrent objects, with the color code and hot keys it would still be filterable, (don't know if thats even a word, but I hope you get my point.) Combine this with SoundSense to play sounds to match the text. It plays, for instance, combat sound when there is a fight. Once you hear this you can press "A" on the keyboard and bring upp a text list that tells you exactly what has happend. (and for the non blind people, this text would be read by a text to speak program or the like, just like this text is). Then zoom to the location and you should be able to see something like G D U G G translated to Grass, dirt, unit, grass, grass. Once you hit the filter key it might tell you that the U for unit really is a Dog. scroll around a bit and you might find another U and once filtered it will tell you that this is a dwarf.
Units and objects in dwarf fortess can overlapp, but even if you can see, we can't see whats in a pile of units or pile of crafts without looKing at it using a hotkey. However the game tries to fix this by changing the displyed item every now and again, no reason to see why your board shouldn't be able to do the same.
Now that I think about it, this isn't to diffrent then what the StoneSense, or what ever the plugin was called, did. It took the info of dwarf fortress and dispalyed a isometric image of the plane, this should in theory be simplier. Skip the part of a program that read the screen info for you, if there is a program out there that can read the dwarf fortress and display it already, it shouldn't be that
hard to change what it displays. Instead of showing a isometric tile of dirts it could display a D instead... add on top the filter to show for instance "s" for all stones untill you change to a what kind of stone filter and you should be able to "see" the world, so to say. Alsong as it only shows 40 tiles worth.
The problem as I see it would be that the program that "talks" to your brallie board would have to be a background application so that you still could move around the fortress with one hand, as you look on the fortress with your other. (Please don't say at this point that you are one handed aswell as blind...)
Do we have the dev of StoneSense here somewere? oh, and another programmer that would be willing to change it to only display 40 tiles and implement a filter on top of that?
Once that part is done all that is left is the menues and embark part. The menus will need to be linked to an output that makes it text that is either read when highlighted or printed on the ballie board.
Once you hit the button for a menu it could display the menu, and once a tool or option is selected go back to the view of the playfield. I see no reasonto why one shouldn't be able to access the data of a for instance the fortress stockpiles when you can access the info on what animal is on what tile.
AS for embark. There is a "the search", tell it what type of area you want to have. River, Aquafier and so on and search. Here non blind people see 3 maps, world, area and local. The world map will be hard, but the area map and the local map should be rather easy, if I ain't totaly wrong the small world map is the same as the area map. After all there is only so many tiles. Once you have searched the area map will show recommendations, this would be rather simple since the tiles that has them will change to to an X every few seconds, and finding it will the board shouldn't be hard. Then once you have the area in question, press the filter button to change to the local map. There arn't that many tiles and the info text displays all you need to know, it will take some time, since it will have to tell you what the area that is currently marked contains. Like this area is cold, has savage beasts, contains clay and a river.
It will take time to get an understanding for what is what, granted, but that is something everyone has to learn as they start playing dwarf fortress.
Now I only wish I was a programmer so I could help make the program for you, but sad to say I am not.
I am sure that would there be a way for me to do that, I would capture the whole blind gaming community.
I hope my long rant can be of use to you, and that what ever text-to-speech or what ever will be able to translate my poor english into something understandable.
We all have our problems, and there are solutions for all of them, if we only can find the right person to help us with it.
Best regards.
The Row.
Author
Topic: Dwarf Fortress for the BLind: Advice sought (Read 56432 times)