Re: Seeking Blind or Visually Impaired Alpha Testers
Voice input's where we're going on mobile and tablets. We'll have an alpha on Android soon-ish. A month let's say. Although I've been consistently wrong with every prediction I've ever made.
Two things to keep in mind re voice input for any kind of virtual world, MUD or otherwise. First, the command language is small. TriadCity has around 250 player commands, of which most players probably only ever use maybe three dozen. So there's not that much for the speech recognition engine to bork. When implementing "natural language" in our parser we found it to be a far more manageable task than our academic backgrounds in AI had led us to predict. Because the "domain specific language" you're working with is quite tiny. The bigger issue with speech recognition is the unusual character and place names, so thought has to go into that. Second, mobile is the future of computing, and as y'all have noted, nobody wants to type into a phone. So the vendors really need to get this right. The good news is that testing so far suggests they're doing pretty well. So is Chrome, BTW: the speech recognition API is pretty usable. Once the vendors have gotten speech synthesis fully sorted we're likely to add speech recognition to the UI we're alpha testing today - we can potentially eliminate the typed input. Or give users the choice. This is very much the roadmap.
Then specifically re TriadCity. Because we don't foreground combat, it's easier for players to interact with most of the game world in a less frantic way than many MUDs. We do make hack-and-slash possible, but you have to seek it out. There are zones specifically for Warriors and other violence-users. Even these, though, tend to emphasize teamwork - you probably don't want to go in there alone. ; So there'll be somebody watching your back, with healing, energizing, and the ability to step in to become your opponent's target if you're getting whomped too badly. And, we've marked up the game world with a "blind friendly" command, which'll tell you whether it's a bad idea to enter a particular place without the GUI, and if so, why. ("Millions of aggressive rats swarm at a very fast pace, making reaction time crucial.") So the issues we expected to find when prototyping talking UIs are not turning out to be as insurmountable as we originally thought.
Which I hope is really good news for all text-based games!
We'll see how much of this turns out to be famous last words!
Cheers,
--M
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