Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news Well, I think they're in contact with the CocoaX developers now regarding engine stuff. There's hope, at least. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=282442#p282442 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news
2016-10-09
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — General Game Discussion : Victorious via Audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news From the perspective of the developer, i think most of this is caused by the engine. They might have thought initially that they could add accessibility, and only encountering unexpected difficulties during the actual implementation. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=282217#p282217 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news @ianhamilton: I basically agree. But, they announced they would make the game accessible from the beginning. Announcing that a project would be made accessible, does also mean they should have checked if the engine is accessible before choosing the engine... So I'll still say this is the developers fault, because they didn't checked up on the engine. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=282123#p282123 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news
2016-10-07
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — General Game Discussion : ianhamilton_ via Audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news The engine is cocos2DX.It's not a case of choosing the wrong engine, or only looking at a subset of engines, or anything like that. There isn't any decent engine that is compatible with screenreaders, unless you count HTML wrappers. Unity, Unreal, Cocos, Corona, GameMaker, Unreal, take your pick, they're all a black hole for screenreaders.If it was fixed, if engines output their UI in a way that screenreaders could actually see, the implications would be pretty staggering. For many games the bulk of accessibility is making sure that elements are sensibly labelled, which developers do anyway, so you would see many many many more games that are accidentally mostly accessible, with just optimisation needed rather than throwing everything in the bin and starting from scratch.Lots of people have been asking over a very long period of time for engine developers to fix their screenreader incompatibility, but to put it bluntly, they aren't interest ed. Or more accurately, don't see it as enough of a priority. 'sounds great, but, you know, we are very busy, we do have lots of important things that we need to work on' 'we'd love to but we have a big new releaes coming up and there's no way we can think about other things' 'you're more than welcome to do the work yourself then we'll see what we can do about integrating it'That last one is the approach that the trese brothers have been taking, trying to do the engine developers' job for them. But it's low level stuff, not really what game developers do normally, and they don't have the time or money. They shouldn't need to spend time and money on doing it either.The reason you see any accessible games at all is due to people developing natively, i.e. without using any engine. Unless you're doing that, all of the Apple guidelines in the world are of no use to you. So natively means coding from scratch for each platform you want to develop on (e.g. build the game for android then build it again separately for iOS, instead of just building once, as you can do with engines), and also having to spent a great deal of time building things from scratch that engines already do for you. That's just not a reasonable ask for any developer who wants to launch on more than one platform or has anything vaguely complex in their game.So please please be patient with developers. The Trese brothers have done nothing wrong here, they've gone over and above to try to rewrite the engine to support screenreaders, but it's beyond their capacity and not something they should have to do anyway.It's engines that you need to direct your frustrations towards. If a developer says they can't make a game due to technical/financial constraints, ask them if it's due to engine incompatibility. Then ask them to make a feature request from the engine d evelopers. Then contact the engine developers yourself too, let them know that it is important and why.I work across all different areas of accessibility for all kinds of impairment, and in my humble opinion engine screenreader incompatibility is easily the biggest issue in game accessibility, it's pretty scandalous. It is so frustrating to see game developers who want to make their games screenreader accessible being blocked from doing so, and so frustrating to see relationships between gamers and developers mistakenly harmed as a result. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=281704#p281704 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news
2016-10-07
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — General Game Discussion : ianhamilton_ via Audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news The engine is cocos2DX.It's not a case of choosing the wrong engine, or only looking at a subset of engines, or anything like that. There isn't any decent engine that is compatible with screenreaders, unless you count HTML wrappers. Unity, Unreal, Cocos, Corona, GameMaker, Unreal, take your pick, they're all a black hole for screenreaders.If it was fixed, if engines output their UI in a way that screenreaders could actually see, the implications would be pretty staggering. For many games the bulk of accessibility is making sure that elements are sensibly labelled, which developers do anyway, so you would see many many many more games that are accidentally mostly accessible, with just optimisation needed rather than throwing everything in the bin and starting from scratch.Lots of people have been asking over a very long period of time for engine developers to fix their screenreader incompatibility, but to put it bluntly, they aren't interest ed. Or more accurately, don't see it as enough of a priority. 'sounds great, but, you know, we are very busy, we do have lots of important things that we need to work on' 'we'd love to but we have a big new releaes coming up and there's no way we can think about other things' 'you're more than welcome to do the work yourself then we'll see what we can do about integrating it'That last one is the approach that the trese brothers have been taking, trying to do the engine developers' job for them. But it's low level stuff, not really what game developers do normally, and they don't have the time or money. They shouldn't need to spend time and money on doing it either.The reason you see any accessible games at all is due to people developing natively, i.e. without using any engine. Unless you're doing that, all of the Apple guidelines in the world are of no use to you. So natively means coding from scratch for each platform you want to develop on, and also having to spent a great deal of time building things from scratch that engines already do for you. That's just not a reasonable ask for any developer who wants to launch on more than one platform or has anything vaguely complex in their game.So please please be patient with developers. The Trese brothers have done nothing wrong here, they've gone over and above to try to rewrite the engine to support screenreaders, but it's beyond their capacity and not something they should have to do anyway.It's engines that you need to direct your frustrations towards. If a developer says they can't make a game due to technical/financial constraints, ask them if it's due to engine incompatibility. Then ask them to make a feature request from the engine developers. Then contact the engine developers yourself too, let them know that it is important and why.I work across all diff erent areas of accessibility for all kinds of impairment, and in my humble opinion engine screenreader incompatibility is easily the biggest issue in game accessibility, it's pretty scandalous. It is so frustrating to see game developers who want to make their games screenreader accessible being blocked from doing so, and so frustrating to see relationships between gamers and developers mistakenly harmed as a result. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=281704#p281704 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news I agree Hector, this is a pain in the kneck but not worth getting annoyed about, what's done is done and the plane, if very annoying fact is that the game won't be accessible. I would however disagree about kickstarter support, since frankly if we don't support people making accessible games, things will not work out well, and usually when a developer with a degree of previous experience promises an accessible game, that is usually what we get, for a great recent example look at Adventure to fate 3 quest to the future. Given that Trees brothers have returned people's money, I'm sadly guessing that star traders 2 won't be accessible, but I wouldn't write them off as a company entirely. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=281417#p281417 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news
2016-10-04
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — General Game Discussion : Victorious via Audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news Which game engine do they use? URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=281384#p281384 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news
2016-10-04
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — General Game Discussion : Hektor via Audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news Honestly, it is always a challenge to assign blame in these kinds of situation. My job involves working with project teams to help them create accessible applications. I have seen situations like this before and it is equally possible the developers made bad choices during the project and end up with something inaccessible or they tried to make good choices but still ended up with something inaccessible.My assumption is that, when these developers picked a game engine, they had a list of requirements. Those things might have included cost, features, platform support, and language support. I have not worked on game engine accessibility, but I imagine the situation is similar to accessibility as it relates to other frameworks. Available accessibility information on frameworks can be non-existent, poor, contrary, or out of date--even if accessibility is something specifically addressed by the framework. I suspect the Trese brothers also were only looking at a subset of all the available game engines because they had requirements for the game engine that would limit their choices. That might mean they didn't have a choice of a game engine that provides good information on its accessibility. Often with frameworks the only good way to know how accessible it is, is to start developing using that framework.Then there is the Trese brother's past experience. They made previous games accessible and it is possible they felt they could handle any accessibility challenges that came up this time.One other thing I probably ought to mention. Just because the game engine is OpenSource does not mean that these developers can fix it. One of the major reasons to pick a game engine is to cut down on development time. However, peple often use framework or game engines because they either don't currently have the ability, time, or skills to create a framework or game engine. In these situations, fixing the OpenSource code might not be an option.< /p>However, in some ways, it does not really matter whose fault it is. What matters is the game won't be accessible. My own guess is they are not quite sure how to handle this because they assumed they would be abel to make the game accessible--but they have run into a wall. What people do next depends on what they think the possible outcomes might be. If you feel there is no way to make the game accessible, then, due to the nature of Kickstarters, you might just let this one go or you might talk with them about a refund or other option. If you wonder if there might be other options for making this game accessible, you might want to talk with them. Figuring out accessibility problems like this can be difficult, so it is possible someone in our community might know something that might help them solve the problem.I will admit I was greatly disappointed at this news. I was looking forward to this game. When I had some sight, these were the types of games I enjoyed playi ng. Unfortunately, it seems like these types of games are rarely accessible so we don't have a lot of options in our community. Though I will admit that I think we have a lot more gaming options today than we did even just a couple years ago--so at least we've seen some over all improvement. Hopefully, this community can continue to assist and push the wider gaming industry to provide us with more accessible options--because honestly we would buy them if they would make them. And once people have some good gaming engine options, there really shouldn't be much more work in designing an accessible game than there is in designing one that is inaccessible.In my own case, I will likely let this one go. I'm not sure I know anything that would contribute to the Trese brothers being able to deliver an accessible game. Also, the nature of Kickstarter is that projects I fund aren't guaranteed to deliver. While I definitely would have problems with some projects failing, it sounds like they made a good faith effort to deliver an accessible game. Perhaps one of the outcomes of this situation is our community will have a better idea of what types of questions to ask about future Kickstarters which might increase the chance they will be successful in delivering accessible games. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=281374#p281374 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news I'm afraid I agree with Slj, they really should've checked this sort of thing at the planning stage, particularly since they sold the game and advertised their kickstarter project as being accessible and accepted cash (and from some of us quite a considerable amount of cash), and they certainly have managed accessibility in at least some of their other titles, both star traders elite and apparently age of pirates rpg for Android. Then again I can't fault their behaviour considering what they could! have done is just either continually promis accessibility and fail to deliver, or simply ignore the question generally, after all some developers are rather scummy in behaviour. While it would be nice if they could fix the problems with this cruddy engine, the fact that they've actively returned people's money probably indicates that isn't going to happen, hopefully they will however now be in a better position to create something accessible in the future or add better access to their next release. For a start, I'm rather sorry age of pirates on Ios isn't accessible. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=281352#p281352 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news
2016-10-04
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — General Game Discussion : Jason SW via Audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news Ok, so they could implement accessibility themselves, but they'd have to go through the source code and figure out exactly what needs to be changed. It's still a massive task, especially for a small team like them. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=281343#p281343 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news They are using an open source engine, which is probably why we were able to get in contact with them . I don't have the name to hand though unfortunately URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=281338#p281338 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news
2016-10-04
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — General Game Discussion : Jason SW via Audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news People, what you need to understand is that it's not them at fault here, it's the engine they're using. From what I understand, usually, when you use an engine to create games, you only get a compiled library file, or series of libraries, so they can't modify the engine on their own. They're completely reliant on the engine developers to build the engine with accessibility in mind.The main reason I see for using an engine to create a game, is that it greatly simplifies the tasks a developer needs to complete to release a game. Without an engine, the developer would probably spend more time on core functionality, rather than working on the game itself. It's good that the engine developers are willing to discuss implementing accessibility. I guess we'll just have to wait and see. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=281337#p281337 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news This is one of the times where Twitter has actually turned out to be useful, They seemed very receptive to dialogue now, so I guess we'll see where this goes URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=281336#p281336 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news
2016-10-04
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — General Game Discussion : pitermach via Audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news Assuming they are using an engine like unity (because really, what else would they be using?), it's true that the engine itself doesn't make its own UI accessible. But the situation with unity isn't as hopeless as people make it out, that is, it's a fully fledged language and lets you call into external libraries. To see an example of this, look at the Entombed 2 preview which has full speech for Mac or Windows. Then, a more recent efford isThis accessibility plugin which already support sapi and tts on phones and works with the existing UI features of Unity.So I honestly don't understand all of the frustration. Coding a library to abstract tts for the different platforms wouldn't take a lot of time, and I'm sure that even if they wrote a custom interface for this game from scratch, they could just go back and make su re it can be used completely from the keyboard and just speak out anything that either pops up or gets focused. If their problem is that there's no easy way to, for example, make a map interface which they only designed to be mouse driven work just by telling the operating system where the different tiles are and go on with life, then maybe they are being slightly lazy or they designed the UI wrong so changing it now would be hard. Normally, this would just take no more than a day or 2 to get working and they could go on working on the game. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=281335#p281335 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news Just an update. The developers behind the engine appear open for dialogue, so hold fire for now . URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=281332#p281332 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news yep, it's the engine that was the issue. I'm going to try and contact the team, as even though I don't expect much, this is one game I've been looking forward to more than any other, and for the access to be out of the developer's hands is heartbreaking. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=281329#p281329 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news Hi.I was going to post this myself, but saw you've already posted this.This is, really, the biggest disappointment and the biggest failure I have seen in long time...I mean, visual impaired and blind people got told that this new awesome game would be accessible, and that it would be made with accessibility in mind from the very beginning. Maybe I remember wrong, but I think they said designed with accessibility in mind from the very beginning...I'm not a developer and I don't know that much about programming, but there is something which I simply don't understand:Apple have put up a lot of guidelines on how to make an app fully accessible with the build in accessibility features on their products. Why is it that difficult to follow those guidelines, if a project is made by accessibility in mind from the very beginning? Is it because of limits? I fully understand that this is a small team who is working on this huge project, and I know that accessibility can be a huge challenge. But what I don't understand is: How can the accessibility in this project be such a huge challenge, when Apple have given the developers all those guidelines? I mean, accessibility does not come as a surprise in this project, when accessibility, as I remember, have been a huge priority from the very beginning...I'm not saying the project or the developers are bad. Not at all. But, I funded the project because this huge and very interesting game would become fully accessible for blind and visual impaired people. So I'm going to ask for a refund...I'm not mad or angry at all. I'm just really, disappointed! URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=281318#p281318 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news
2016-10-04
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — General Game Discussion : darren via Audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news oh well i'll be unfollowing them on twitter. pointless following someone who isn't going to make their game accessible. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=281321#p281321 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news
2016-10-04
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — General Game Discussion : connor142 via Audiogames-reflector
Re: star traders 2, unfortunate news I think its not really the fact that they didn't follow the guidelines, I'm actually quite sure they tried to follow them, but I more think its simply because of the engine their using to power the game. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=281319#p281319 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
star traders 2, unfortunate news
2016-10-04
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — General Game Discussion : connor142 via Audiogames-reflector
star traders 2, unfortunate news hello everyone, I have some unfortunate news for all the people who enjoyed star traders rpg and were looking forward to the second installment of this game. In the latest kickstarter campagne update, trees brothers stated that accessibillity for the game is unfortunately not an option anymore, and they listed several reasons for this. You can read the update at this link:https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tr … ts/1698551 URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=281317#p281317 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
