Re: Audio Interfaces and Systems
@Victorious
I can't really say as to how practical it would be, since this has never really been done before. There are all sorts of challenges and potential ways to go about doing it, but I think a game similar to Dune 2 may be possible, but not without some sort of color system in place to help make it easier to differentiate between factions and objects.
As for resolution, lets say you have a sighted game running at 640 by 480 resolution, typically sprites in such a game would be around 32 by 32, or even 64 by 64 pixels so players could visually read them properly, which means that the maximum amount of tiles players could see would be 20 by 15, or 300 different tiles, or for 64 by 64 tiles, that would be 10 by 7.5, or 75 tiles. Players also typically spend most of their time focusing on only a handful of those, their character, enemies, powerups, etc.
In a non-sighted game we could use solid single color blocks to symbollically represent an entire sprite or object as a single tone. This means that unlike sighted games, you don't need sprites to be 32 by 32, or 64 by 64, its all the same. The only difference to you would be that the sound would play longer and in a wider pitch, the tone and what it represents wouldn't change. This means that you could potentially get away with 4 by 4 pixel blocks, or 8 by 8 and still get a similar amount of relevant information over a smaller area.
@CAR_Jones
If nothing else I think it would be interesting to explore this, even if it doesn't work out. I created a mockup image of a chess board with 32 pieces, white blocks on top, grey blocks on bottom. Running the vOICe on very slow motion seemed to work alright for making out where each piece was respectively. If it were an actual game, the player could put their mouse over a piece or move around a selection box and it could tell them what the currently selected piece was to help guide them. I might try throwing together a functional prototype and see how it goes.
In other news, i've uploaded two prototypes i've been working with, i'd be interested to see what everyone thinks. Unfortunately it seems Google Drive is flagging one of them, sigh. Anyway you can download the other one as a win32 binary here:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id= … sp=sharing
The first is a 2D side scrolling engine I wrote, and is going alot better than the other. It has a built in Audio renderer and i've fixed some performance issues, but its stuck at a single speed for now. If you want to use the vOICe with it for faster rendering, press TAB in game to disable the internal Audio Renderer.
For controls:
Left and Right arrow keys to move Left and Right
Up arrow for jumping
ESC to quit
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