Civ3 Patch - Red/Green Colorblindness

[jkjones]

Greetings fellow Civ'ers. I'm writing to help drum up support and encouragement for Firaxis to produce an "Alternate Color Patch" similar to what they did for SMAC.

As a person who is red/green colorblind (yes, I can tell what color the stoplight is!) I have had difficulty with some of the display items in Civ3 due to the red/green coloring. I had no idea what the little circle next to a unit meant (amount of movement left - green means that they have their full movement points, yellow means partial movement points and red means zero movement points) until I read the manual. The forest and jungle can be difficult to differentiate as well.

Hopefully, this won't be too difficult to do and will greatly improve the enjoyment of the game for the red/green colorblind Civ gamers among us.

Thanks in advance!

JKJ

p.s. At Dan Q.'s advice, I've also sent this request to the "Ask the Civ Team" folks at Firaxis.

[Jon Miller]

I am color blind too

how many others are??

Jon Miller

[d_dudy]

reminds me of this teacher i had who was color blind (but super duper smart!) and when he had his new computer in his room me and my friend were playing on it and my i said how ugly the hot pink backround was (don't ask me why it was already like that, i don't know) and my friend says "how can you stand to look at that" to the theacher. when i reminded him that our teacher was color blind he was pretty embarassed.

well, that was OT

i guess what i'm saying is that i support this.


p.s. how can you tell the stop sign colors apart? i've heard of a contact that helps color blind people....

[aderen]

me too. It seems not many games take this into consideration.
There should be an option for alternative colors.

[star mouse]

Or perhaps every software house should have a colourblind consultant who can say whether the colours are hard to see. The complexity with this is that there's at least four types of red/green colourblindness, so more than one set of alternative colours may be needed.

[aderen]

I thought i was the only software developer with color blindness. At least when I do something, red/green color blind people won't complain

[CobraA1]

I've heard most stoplights have some other color mixed in to tell them apart.

In any case, the graphics can be edited, so I would imagine that making a graphic set for the color blind should be easy.

[MxM]

Originally posted by d_dudy
how can you tell the stop sign colors apart?

It is different kind of color blindness, but AFAIK it is more common. I have moderate case of this color blindness. I can perfectly distinct colors, but I can not see them

Let me give an exaggerated example. If there is only one red leaf on the tree, and the rest is green, then person with normal vision will immediately see that one leaf. But I will not notice it, unless somebody shows the leaf to me, (or after long systematic search, looking leaf by leaf). Only then, when I look directly on it I will say that it is red.

[aderen]

it's exactly the same with me.

[star mouse]

Perhaps we could get someone with red/green colourblindness to do a graphics mod? We've already seen a mod with alternative seas and mountains, and Elvis as the domestic advisor ... so how hard would this be?

[mrbilll]

When I went through boot camp (many years ago), they sorted out all of the color blind guys- they were ineligible for certain jobs.

I was surpised to see that that amounted to about 15-20% of the group, a substantial minority. I'd think issues like this would be something an experienced game design team would already know about.

[Grumbold]

Dan Magaha has made an aspirational post on this topic, so it has been noted by Firaxis and they hope to get round to doing something. The civ colors can already be edited but it is going to be trickier to change in game graphics and text fonts.

[JustJoe]

Jsut do what I do...Move the unit until it wont move anymore. That way you dont need the little red/yellow/green light...
And there is the little active unit screen that states how many movement points you have left...

as for the Jungle and forest...Ok, you got me there...Maybe they can texture it differently...

[regoarrarr]

I had a boss that was color-blind. I was preparing an Excel spreadsheet for him and had set the background colors of 2 rows as green to set them apart. He came over to review it and asked "is that green?" I looked at him strangely, not knowing how to take it - if he meant it as a joke, or a criticism or what. Then he told me he was color-blind and was really asking it as a question

[stend]

Originally posted by jkjones I had no idea what the little circle next to a unit meant (amount of movement left - green means that they have their full movement points, yellow means partial movement points and red means zero movement points) until I read the manual. The forest and jungle can be difficult to differentiate as well.

I don't want to minimize the importance of the game being accessible to those who are colorblind, but you really need to distinguish problems from not reading the manual from problems due to poor color selection. As for the forest and the jungle looking similar, again, that's not a colorblindness issue - the graphics for those are way too similar.

[El hidalgo]

I'm color-blind too. (<-- that's not me being cool, that's me being [color]blind ). Just in case you wonder, stop lights were designed with color-blind people in mind. I may not see the red light and green light as you see them, but they still look different to me, and this is by design (can you imagine the chaos if the Department of Transportation had not been so thoughtful?).

If you have normal color vision and you want to see what the color blind see, go to http://www.vischeck.com/showme.shtml . They have a color blindness simulator (scroll down on the page). As a color blind person, I can tell you that it's accurate -- the "normal" picture and the "color blind" picture look exactly the same to me (of course there's no way for me to see what someone with normal vision sees). It also shows the rarer blue/yellow form of color blindness (now that one looks different to me).

Anyway the site seems to be a way to promote their color-blindness simulator software, which would allow you to see any image as the color blind see it. Maybe Firaxis should buy it.

[lschaef]

Originally posted by stend
I don't want to minimize the importance of the game being accessible to those who are colorblind, but you really need to distinguish problems from not reading the manual from problems due to poor color selection. As for the forest and the jungle looking similar, again, that's not a colorblindness issue - the graphics for those are way too similar.

It's not really an issue of reading the manual or not. I'm also red/green colorblind as well. I noticed a little dot next to units, but didn't realize that they were changing colors. I can often tell the difference between colors if I look real hard and tend not to look that hard unless something like that is pointed out. If I had seen the change in colors I probably would have started looking at the manual to see what the colors meant.

I also have trouble telling the difference between the jungle and some of the forest squares. I've been doing a lot of right clicking on things. I do feel like I can play the game ok as it is, but would welcome some tweeking to help us out.

BTW...as far as traffic lights go. Red is always on the top or on the left and green is brighter then the red. I didn't know that they mixed other colors in with them. The only time I have trouble are the blinking yellow or red lights when they only have one light there. If there aren't any cars in front of me to help me out I take my best guess, but slow down and watch for cars crossing the other way.

[CobraA1]

Tried the simulator on my webpage, but my CSS messed it up .

Got around it, though - took a screenshot and ran the picture through - it looks like my page is colorblind-friendly.

[Purple]

Add my voice to the chorus calling for this option. I have a minor hearing comprehension problem (I hear OK; I just have trouble understanding and retaining heard information. For example, song lyrics are usually opaque to me.), so I can imagine how annoying color confusion can be.

As I'm still waiting for delivery, can someone tell me how easy it is to assign a custom color (or pattern?) to a given Civ? Do you assign them at startup? Or does a file it require a text editor or paint program?

Just curious.

[treedom]

I'm colour-blind too. I think that more serious than the terrain mod (since that can be changed by us) is the civ colours. Some of them I simply can't tell appart (i.e. Germans vs. French, Egyptians vs. Greeks). This makes it very difficult to know who a city belongs to, as there is *NO OTHER WAY* to find out (other than by the name, but it can be conquered, so that's not always sufficient). At least before you could click on it and see. This also makes the borders on the mini-map hard to distinguish.

Please Firaxis, fix this!

[star mouse]

One thing that is still common with game designs is the use of a single colour to distinguish different teams. For example, in CIV2, the French were dark blue, the Babylonians green, the Russians white and so forth. These colours also cannot be changed and this can be a problem. Even people with normal colour vision can have trouble distinguishing some of the colours chosen if the colour is only a small splash and there are similar colours in use.

What I would like to see in future game designs would be the use of two colours for each team, and the selection of the colours used for the teams under user control. For people like me with normal colour vision, it won't matter too much, but for all those colourblind people that see a huge variety of shades of "brown" instead of reds and greens, it can be a real help. Suppose you only had five colours you could distinguish reliably: Black, White, Cyan, Yellow and Grey. If these colours were combined in all possible combinations, there would be 15 teams, including 5 with a single colour. Only 5 would be possible if a single colour was chosen.

[MarkG]

Dan added a note in the latest "ask the civ team" feature. check it out!
www.civ3.com

[treedom]

Nice! Our voice has been heard. Thanks Firaxis!