This is more for Nicholas, I reckon, but probably anyone could answer it. Right now Skyrim is ripping my head apart with its crap grasp of Field of View. A number of recent games have added FoV sliders to combat this, but they've all been poorly implemented as they don't give a numeric value. It gave me a few thoughts, and thusly a few questions. 1. Is FoV going to be an issue with CE, and if so, will GLG be adding an FoV slider w/ numeric values? 2. Subtitles - Will they be an option, assuming any dialogue or audio cues are present? 3. Colour Blind Mode (I won't need it, but I assume others will)? 4. Will the game distribute hugs and cuddles as required, or will it be pugs and daggles?
Yup, orthographic projection. Like, um, how about the attached screenshot - which is an in-engine shot. So like that, except not with super old assets from months ago and generally much better all around. IF there is any particular voice work (and our inclination is against it from a cost & translation standpoint), it'll get subtitles. We'll do something with this probably based on stuff like what the new Sim City did (which at least got colour blindness accessibility right, if little else). More of the latter, I'm sorry to say. :\
Awesomes. So assuming everything is sound cues instead, will there be some way to make it more 'visual'? Well, I never played the new one so I'm not sure what it did, but I'm sure those who need the option will be grateful you're doing something. Noooooooooo.
Soooooo....back on topic.... My grandparents are Silver Surfers but one of them suffers from some pretty bad arm issues and can't move a mouse or use a keyboard 'quickly.' She loves games like peggle and bejeweled, which brought to my mind the question of how quickly you're going to have to click in Clockwork. I know you guys have made mention many times that this isn't an RTS and that APM isn't important, but do you have any idea of things like pause buttons and general speed of gameplay?
And, considering Anno and The Settlers have been cited as influences (to the best of my knowledge), will these come in 'levels' of speed or will it be a one-speed-fits-all scenario?
I'm very into the idea of a pause button and allowing actions to be queued up while paused in the manner of the various Paradox grand strategy games or, say, Baldur's Gate. CE is not a game about requiring speedy micromanagement. Pausing in multiplayer might be a question worth thinking on, but I think our general policy is to have it be opt-in or controlled by the game "owner" or something. Nicholas would have to comment on changing gameplay speed from a technical standpoint. Certainly it would at least be problematic to increase game speed because that would require increasing the speed of all the simulation calculations.
Exactly the information I was looking for. Thanks! I myself am a fan of the pause button so it's nice to hear that at least one of the dev team agrees!
The whole talking about vision and that screenshot brought another question to my mind: How will we see things behind buildings? Will they get transparent or is the camera actually rotatable?
You can rotate the camera to 4 different views. Things might also end up transparent, I'm not sure if it's been decided or not.
Some of the other Bioware games are great examples of being able to set orders while paused.. KOTOR, DA:O etc. Changing the game speed would indeed make a big difference, but not a particularly easy thing to implement, unless you thought about it from the very outset. Not really something that you can retrofit. Also there are better references than SimCity for how to do colourblindness. Trying to do daltonisation is a pretty full-on approach and isn't entirely successful either, it only really works when you have a very limited colour palette and really should be a last resort. A far far better approach is simply not to rely on colour alone to communicate information. Always use it in conjuction with shape, symbol, text etc. If you have some other way to communicate the message (making it more usable for everyone) colour choice is no longer an issue and you don't need to mess around with things like daltonisation. You've absolutely hit the nail on the head with the multiplayer pausing - make it a matchmaking preference. Another fantastic example of a matchmaking preference that's helpful for people with disabilities is the 'chattiness' preference in Halo Reach, which neatly solves the huge problem of people with impaired speech or hearing being kicked out of games for not communicating well enough. If you're interested in more ways to open up the game to people with a wider range of abilities have a look through here: http://www.gameaccessibilityguidelines.com I hope some of the above is of use!
Quick question on the subtitles too, have you thought about full closed captioning? i.e. include subtitles for important audio cues too? Again DA:O is a great example, gives you the choice of none / speech only / speech and background noises. Formatting is crucially important too, good high contrast text in a simple clear font etc. Something that would be really helpful and something that noone to my knowledge has done before either (nice bit of publicity for being the first) would be to actually allow a little customisation of how they are displayed - allowing people to choose whether or not they are letterboxed, for example.
Hmm, that's really interesting. I don't see why the sound logic couldn't be hooked up to a text ticker of some kind that plays a descriptive string associated with each sound effect (because, really, it's not so different from debug output with better formatting). I'll put this and other ideas into our internal wiki.
I'd definitely recommend having a pay with Dragon Age : Origins and Portal 2 to see it in action. It does have a little trickiness, the complication is when you have lots of sounds going on at once, so you need a way of prioritising. Simplest is just to make sure that only the important sounds have text strings associated. more advanced would be to also restrict how frequently sounds are played, and set speech as priority 1, sounds that are important to gameplay as priority 2, and sound that's important to atmosphere as priority 3. So you might for example have it so that every couple if seconds if a gameplay sound needs paying display that, if not then display a background sound if there's one that needs playing.. but that's always overridden by speech, which always displays. That's the approach that the studios who are most advanced in the field take. If you wanted to trump them all (as well as that thing about allowing people to choose whether or not they are letterboxed, which has never been done before but would be really useful) you could also allow players to have access to that ' couple of seconds' variable, so they can choose how quickly they want the text to appear and disappear, which would be really useful for some people as hearing impairments often go hand in hand with low reading age. That's all obviously far more work, but even if it's not achievable for CE I hope it's interesting at least!
