Re: New sonification software for increased accessibility
@SLJ - you're welcome!
1.) I hadn't thought of the compass way of doing things. If you think of a typical first person shooter, then it's quite possible that the player's location and their pitch (i.e. looking angle up or down) are stored as two 'vec3's - that is, x/y/z for the location and another three values stored as either degrees or radians indicating rotation (i.e. pitch and yaw).
A trigger could be made that then says North, North-East, East or such as the player rotated into each 45 degree segment. This still might not be all that much use for navigating the game the world though as you still might not know about ledges, drops, lifts and the such - but it might a good start. It could also be that the yaw/pitch/roll values are stored as quaternions, which would may possibly make things a little trickier, but likely nothing that couldn't be resolves with a few cups of coffee and a maths text book.
2.) The software's not really geared towards visualising game worlds, but in later versions of the software it may be possible to place audio 'beacons' into the game world. The irrKlang audio library allows you to create a 3D sound beacon at a given location, and update your location relative to it, then the sound will play in a spatialised manner relative to your location, and you can specify the sound drop-off distance parameters and such. It may be possible to doppler shift the playback rate based on your speed in relation to the beacon if I'm understanding the irrKlang docs correctly.
To do something like this you'd need a workflow such as:
a.) Find a pointer chain to your players position,
b.) Go to some in-game feature such as a lift or a button or pressure-pad or such,
c.) Write down the coordinates of the feature and what it is.
d.) Create a beacon trigger set at the feature coordinates and with the sound, which would have to be looping, you want p
layed (note: beacon triggers don't exist yet, but if I was going to add this facility that's likely what I'd call 'em).
e.) Play the game with the beacon active and it'll provide audio feedback based on the relative positions of the player and the beacon.
As far as I'm aware nothing I've suggested sounds outside the realms of possibility of what could be achieved, and your ideas are really good ones, but that functionality isn't available at present and would definitely have to be a feature added in a later release. As the software will be open source it might not even be something I end up implementing - many hands make light work and all that - but if people do modify and improve the software they can always issue a pull request to merge their functionality back into my version, or they could keep it in their own fork of the software, it's entirely up to them.
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