Colorblindness support; we need your help

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allejo
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Colorblindness support; we need your help

Post by allejo »

BZFlag, the game, is not friendly towards colorblind players and over the years, there have been many players who have struggled to play due to this fact. Up until now, the official suggestion is to have players manually modify their client with a set of commands to change the colors the game uses for text or radar. However, this option does not change the textures in the game itself so tanks or shots aren't affected. Additionally, without searching the forums or a configuration file, I don't remember the values to change off the top of my head. If I can't remember it, why should you?


Our Goal

We'd like to officially change this and bring official support for colorblindness. The goal is to have awesome colorblind support for 2.6; however, 2.6 is still really far away. This means we'd like to experiment and test colorblind support in BZFlag 2.4 either as a full release or development releases for players to download. This would allow us to learn what works and what doesn't in order to apply all that knowledge to 2.6.


How will it work?
  1. You'll open BZFlag
  2. Go to Options > Display Settings > Colorblind Mode
  3. Set your form of colorblindness
  4. BZFlag will automatically update the colors and textures to be better suited to your type of colorblindness.
* We haven't added support yet, so don't go looking for this.


How can you help?

There's only so much we can accomplish or test with colorblindness simulations, so we will be needing your help with testing and feedback. The more the merrier!

If you have a form of colorblindness or struggle to differentiate between colors BZFlag uses do one or all of the following:
  • Subscribe to this topic to get a notification whenever there are new posts
  • Reply to this thread or send me a PM saying that you'd be interested in testing any development builds
    • I'll be keeping a list of players to send messages to with updates to new clients
  • Reply to this thread with what color related components and what colors you struggle with
    • For example, "I can't differentiate red vs green on the scoreboard and radar that's why I prefer red vs blue." The more information you give us, the better we'll be able to support colorblindness.

When can I expect this awesomeness?

We rarely have strict release dates or an actual schedule with BZFlag releases so I don't want to promise a specific date. However, this is a project I'd like to work on over the summer so it depends on much feedback we get and the amount of support this project gets.


Thanks for tanking with BZFlag!
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gorgomol
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Re: Colorblindness support; we need your help

Post by gorgomol »

will appreciate to be advise.
till now i have to change the std_ground.png grass from green to grey to minimise my colorblindness , and set all shoot color on radar white..
grazie.
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The Noah
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Re: Colorblindness support; we need your help

Post by The Noah »

I'm interested in testing it, although I'm not colorblind :D

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JeffM
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Re: Colorblindness support; we need your help

Post by JeffM »

Then your testing would be useless. Leave it to the people with the condition. Input from other sources is irrelevant and only adds noise to actual real work.
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Misadventure
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Re: Colorblindness support; we need your help

Post by Misadventure »

Sounds good! I'm not colourblind, but sometimes struggle (seemingly more than most) to identify some team flags on radar (Enhanced radar running on low opacity).

This seems to affect me most for Green flag, next Blue. It can be fun searching for team flags, but to me there is some disparity between visibility of these and the more prominent Red & Purple

Thx for your tip Gorgomol. I've just tried knocking down the green saturation on std_ground.png which is helpful.

I've thought that an ability to reduce the brightness of white flags on radar may be helpful too and saves frequent toggling. Perhaps for some colour impaired vision, the team flag crosses could also be represented differently to general flags, perhaps with a circle around.
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