Hi Thomas, You've certainly got a point here. It brings me along to a project I've spent some time on, and am contemplating expanding towards a fully accessible game. Info is as follows: Anyone heard of the console game called Empire? Empire is a game where you play against up to 5 computer players. Each starts off with one city on the map. Each city can produce one type of unit. Units are: Armies which can only move over land, Fighter planes able to travel over land and sea, and ships of different purposes, namely Troop Transports, Destroyers, Submarines, Cruisers, Aircraft Cariers, and Battle Ships. It is a turn by turn game. Armies can move one block per round, fighters 4, and ships 2.
Armies is the only entities that can concour cities. Once a new city is concoured, you can assign it to produce whatever you want. It is a war type stratagy game. All units are displayed on the console window using character representations. Your units are displayed in capital letters, and the enemy units are lower case. Further more, each player's units are colour coded to distinguashe them from each other. Now, I've played this game a lot using my braille display, but there's a lot of people who doesn't have something like this, and using your jaws cursor to interpret the screen is much to cumbersome. So, I whent along and baught the source code from the original creater of the game, and started converting it to be more blind friendly. This entailed stuff like spoken informational messages, like City 1 completed an army, or enemy fighter destroyed, your destroyer has 2 hits left. Further more, when prompted to move a piece, the game will automatically anounce stuff like: Enemy city to the east, Enemy army to the north east, etc. Now comes the big question: For me to build in a review system by which blind players can review the map with the arrows, etc, will take a lot of work, especially if I build in everything I've thought about so far. The licence obtained by me when I bought the source code, however, implied that I can modify the game for my own use, but cannot distribute it. Now there seams to me two ways out of this one, namely to go ahead and hope to keep under the radar, as you said, or to rewrite the game from the start, using only the concept of the original game to guide me. The seccond job is obviously much more intricate, and because I'll have to do this part-time, it will be a long-term project. Now you guys know how it goes with this stuff, if you get home from work, programming solutions for other people, you most certainly aren't motivated to spend the rest of the day at home with the same job, but if a subject interest you, you sometimes amaze yourself. I wouldn't however do this if there's no interest in the rest of the VI communaty though, for I can play the game as is, although certain alterations would make it easier, for example, an automatic analysis of the map to point you to the greatest consentration of enemy forces, etc. Constantly reviewing the map with a braille display is actually verry tyering. Any thoughts on this? Regards, M.J. _______________________________________________ Gamers mailing list .. Gamers@audyssey.org To unsubscribe send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can visit http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org to make any subscription changes via the web.
