Re: I'm finishing a roguelike for the visually impaired
Well pure corrdinates are okay for a few objects in close proximity, say a crowd of orcs on a room, but given how big (relative to your character), and how complex dungeon layouts in roguelikes can be, a little more information is likely needed. After all a chess board is only 64 squares, with at most half of them occupied by peaces, only one of which can move at a time, (and I still! personally find chess hard to play with just the coordinates, prefering more of an overview such as an actual board).
In a roguelike you are talking something about 120 x 120 tyles, and while it's true you only have your chracter to move, there can be lots of monsters, likewise the layout can be very mazelike as I said.
btw, I assume by dcss we're talking about dungeon crawl stone soup? unfortunately I can't get the bloody thing not! to cover the entire screen, and for some reason when a console window runs full screen supernover doesn't read the text.
I'v e been into the init file in settings and changed fullscreen=true to fullscreen=false, and mucked about with the window settings but it does no good.
This is quite annoying, especially since usually in windows alt enter is all that is necessary to fix this problem (that's what worked back when Eamon deluxe used to do this).
@Brad, nethack, dcss, and angband are rogluelikes. a Roguelike is a very complicated dungeon crawling rpg game with a top down perspective and tyle based 8 way movement. They are famous for using ascii symbols instead of lettersto represent everything in the game, though some now also have graphic tyles as I said.
Some blind people (with likely more patience than me), have used braille displays and a very slow and careful viewing of the screen to play these games, however given that the most expensive sort of braille display you can have is only 80 characters, and the size of dungeons displayed in a roguelike screen are something in the order of 120x300 characters, (not counting the character stats display and status line that says what's going on), it's quite a tortuous process, which is why we don't list roguelikes in the database the way we list interactive fiction inteprreters.
Interestingly enough, if a full screen braille display were ever developed, roguelikes would be the first and most instantly accessible games available to play, ---- though sadly both technology and finances are running way behind this at the moment.
I have been in contact with the developers of Angband, since there are a lot of features in that game that make it nearly! accessible, however the location of walls and ability to navigate such a large dungeon without reference to the overview hasn't been got around successfully yet.
If you have a braille display and want to try any of these though, be my guest.
This should also explain why a rroguelike which gives full information to a vi player and has correctly worked out mechanics for it's display is such a fascinating prospect.
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=149653#p149653
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