[Audyssey] Making open source games accessible
Hi all. In the past I've considered making some games that have open source versions accessible, but gave up because either the source code was too complex ( 4 mb of source files) or the inserting of an access framework would take too much time for a holiday project or parts of the game would need to be completely redesigned. For that expense in effort I might as well rewrite something that I understand fully, which is a different kettle of fish entirely. I know that it has been done before and is possible, take winBoard and quake as examples. Is anyone currently porting an open source game? Could you offer any pointers to (i) selecting a project and (ii) Stratigies to port a game? Any other thoughts and comments are also welcome. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Making open source games accessible
Hi Willem, I'm currently not working on any open source games, but I have looked into it. As you discovered in most cases the game would have to be completely rewritten from scratch to add accessibility support, because the original design didn't have any room for accessibility to be bolted on afterwards Certain things would have to drastically change in order to make those games accessible. For example, let's take Vectoroids which is a free and open source version of Asteroids for Linux. For starts there is no positional audio and the asteroids don't make any sounds until you either shoot them or crash into one. Well, since its built using SDL you could probably add extra code so that SDL Mixer would pan the asteroids in real time, but as we know SDL Mixer really isn't ideal for that kind of audio. We'd probably have to end up removing sDL Mixer completely and replace it with OpenAL so we could have 3d audio support and a more realistic audio sound scape. For things like scoring, lives remaining, etc we'd probably have to add speech-dispatcher support and add additional keyboard commands to give speech feedback for various status messages on screen. Its easy to do, but since there is no cross-platform TTS API you would have to have special builds for Mac, Windows, and Linux in order to offer native speech support for each platform which is certainly a hassle. That's quite a bit of work for a relatively simple game. Something like Freeciv or Lin City would be far more complex. Flight Gear would be a nice flight sim, but adding access could be a rather daunting task given that that game is huge. It all depends on how hard you want to work at accessibility in those games. Cheers! On 6/6/12, Willem Venter dwill...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all. In the past I've considered making some games that have open source versions accessible, but gave up because either the source code was too complex ( 4 mb of source files) or the inserting of an access framework would take too much time for a holiday project or parts of the game would need to be completely redesigned. For that expense in effort I might as well rewrite something that I understand fully, which is a different kettle of fish entirely. I know that it has been done before and is possible, take winBoard and quake as examples. Is anyone currently porting an open source game? Could you offer any pointers to (i) selecting a project and (ii) Stratigies to port a game? Any other thoughts and comments are also welcome. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Making open source games accessible
Well, FWIW, came across this open source instance of the old, elite, spaceTraders game source code yesterday, but, it's apparently in visualStudio.Net 2005 version of C#, apparently, but anyway: http://cplus.about.com/od/codelibraryfo2/ss/spacetrader.htm Aside from that, have got, and already hosted an instance of the free version of a sort of online, multi-user/player RPG PHP script here called Dragon Knight that might also want to modify to take out graphical rendering of things like maps etc. at some stage: http://dragon.se7enet.com/dev.php It's running on my site here: http://www.blindza.co.za/dk/ Stay well Jacob Kruger Blind Biker Skype: BlindZA '...fate had broken his body, but not his spirit...' - Original Message - From: Willem Venter dwill...@gmail.com To: gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2012 1:07 PM Subject: [Audyssey] Making open source games accessible Hi all. In the past I've considered making some games that have open source versions accessible, but gave up because either the source code was too complex ( 4 mb of source files) or the inserting of an access framework would take too much time for a holiday project or parts of the game would need to be completely redesigned. For that expense in effort I might as well rewrite something that I understand fully, which is a different kettle of fish entirely. I know that it has been done before and is possible, take winBoard and quake as examples. Is anyone currently porting an open source game? Could you offer any pointers to (i) selecting a project and (ii) Stratigies to port a game? Any other thoughts and comments are also welcome. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
