Colour blindness setting?

[Total Oh No]

I'm not colour blind myself, but watching gameplay videos by Colonel Failure (who I assume must have a problem with red/green) makes me think about how much of a struggle this game must be for people with colour vision impairment, red/green in particular. The colour of cableway cables is hard enough to see even with "normal" eyes. It must be impossible if the colours blend together.

Biggest problems, off of the top of my head:
-The placement of buildings is displayed as red cubes vs green cubes.
-The resource density on the ground is shown by red cubes vs green cubes, below the other red and green cubes of the building placement.
-Cableway cables swap between red and green depending on if it's possible for them to connect or not.
-Non-chain train signals alternate between red and green.

I would suggest a setting in the options menu that lets you change the green colour into blue. Blue of course wouldn't work well with train signals, since the chain signal already can be blue, but it would work for all the other cases, which are more important anyway.
Even better would be if the player could pick the colours themselves.

Any red/green impaired people here with an opinion on this?

[3division]

I'm curious how many people affected with this.. you know we not having much time.. so this kind of features are low priority... so if someone have problem with this.. let us know here! :-)

[Storpappa]

I am blind
Well that is a very big word with many ranges of blindness
From NLP (No light perception)
LP (light Perception)
How many fingers am I holding up 1 meter in front of your eyes
All those numbers above 20/200
Legally blind in the US and many other countries 20/200 best correction

I game awesome, as many of you who read my pro tips know
I am also the worst gamer, as many who chat with me on Discord know
I make stupid mistakes - you can't prevent those without making the game un-fun for everyone else

I don't want to speak on behave of the color blind, because I am not a member of that group

However, I have many years of experience with low vision issues and technology.

I just placed an iron mine. Where was the best spot? Save game, place, buy for $, log out, load saved game

Could you just tell me the % of the mine before it is placed?
That takes away the speculation and fun of aww, I just missed the best spot.
If you add that in game, even as an option, it will be abused
If you add it under the What would Che do?, it will be abused
So can you work around those issues easily? Sure - add it as a What would Che do? option, and let players who need it enable it. The gamer who can't play on Cosmonaut Mode

Aww, no you didn't, you made us read all this and still plugged your guide.

They will use it. But they can use it today with the above multi-step work around.

[John Personage]

I've been tested by specialists on a few occasions and according to one guy I am the most colour blind person he had ever seen... and I have no problems with colours in the game at all. The red/green thing is only a problem when the shades of red and green are muddy or not distinct. the reds and greens used in WRSR are like traffic lights.. obvious. Colour blindness is actually more like "shade blindness".

[nowotnypl]

Originally posted by Total Oh No:

I'm not colour blind myself, but watching gameplay videos by Colonel Failure (who I assume must have a problem with red/green)

I know exaclty the video you are talking about. :)

I've been watching Colonel Failure's videos for over 2 years now and I don't think he has any problems with seeing colors. It's more of a Colonel being Colonel problem. :) You know, the signals also have arrows now - just saying... :)

[lucien sanchez]

Originally posted by John Personage:

I've been tested by specialists on a few occasions and according to one guy I am the most colour blind person he had ever seen... and I have no problems with colours in the game at all. The red/green thing is only a problem when the shades of red and green are muddy or not distinct. the reds and greens used in WRSR are like traffic lights.. obvious. Colour blindness is actually more like "shade blindness".

Just chiming in to add another voice; I'm also very red-green colour blind and plenty of games have given me trouble but W&R gives me no problems either.

[baronjutter]

I'm also red-green colour blind and find things like resource quality maps and specially the pollution map almost impossible to read. There's many types of colour blindness but by far the most common is red-green, which is why overlays and things in games should not really be red green based. Make things go blue to red or something.

What also helps is contrast in the brightness. A dark red and light green are much easier for people to notice than a light red and light green.

Text options help too where shades of colour give hints. When we are placing a mine it would be nice if over our mouse it would tell us what the resource quality % will be before we place it. With my eyes I can tell where a resource deposit is but it's very hard to guess what the result will be. 30%? 90%? It's often a surprise. So just give us the numbers too, more information is always better.

For pollution map I'd love to see it so only grids with pollution get any shade, so clean areas just don't show any colour while areas with some pollution perhaps shade from light red to dark red. Just an idea. And again with text that's always good, you could always have a little number under each pollution cube showing an actual exact numerical amount just so it's totally clear no matter what colours we can or can't see.

[Total Oh No]

Originally posted by baronjutter:

Sades of colour give hints. When we are placing a mine it would be nice if over our mouse it would tell us what the resource quality % will be before we place it. With my eyes I can tell where a resource deposit is but it's very hard to guess what the result will be. 30%? 90%? It's often a surprise. So just give us the numbers too, more information is always better.

That would be a nice change for everyone. Especially because the radius of a mine is only like half of what is actually shown when you are about to build one.

[rowdog]

The dev behind delta V: Rings of Saturn shared a simple post processing shader that remaps the existing screen colors. I'm not sure it's a complete solution but it seems like an easy way to help some folks.
https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/9u1y6f/adding_colorblind_accessibility_with_an/

[baronjutter]

The problem with things like that is that a most colour blind people just want like UI elments and overlays re-coloured, not the entire game. We're used to seeing the world how it looks with our eyes, it looks just as weird to us when there's an entire screen-wide re-mapping of colours. Just add a little more contrast to shades in the UI and that's generally enough for 99% of colour blind folks.

[John Personage]

Originally posted by baronjutter:

The problem with things like that is that a most colour blind people just want like UI elments and overlays re-coloured, not the entire game. We're used to seeing the world how it looks with our eyes, it looks just as weird to us when there's an entire screen-wide re-mapping of colours. Just add a little more contrast to shades in the UI and that's generally enough for 99% of colour blind folks.

I agree. Contrast is everything.

[Cronicma]

I'm having a hard time with placement of coalmines due to my color blindness, as red dots on a green background is almost invicible to me. I would recomend using blue to mark the resources, as blue on green background would be much more visible to me (and others with the same type of color blindness). But I love the game, and so far my girlfriend has been helpfull when ever I need to place a mine.

[Ismael Nogueira]

Originally posted by 3division:

I'm curious how many people affected with this.. you know we not having much time.. so this kind of features are low priority... so if someone have problem with this.. let us know here! :-)

3 years of "low priority feature" can be considered "priority" now?? :)

[Fry3k]

Originally posted by 3division:

I'm curious how many people affected with this.. you know we not having much time.. so this kind of features are low priority... so if someone have problem with this.. let us know here! :-)

It is indeed very common. 9 % of men an 1 % of women have at least to a certain degree problems with differentiating red and green. For me the biggest difficulties are the dots when placing a mine over a resource and the color of the power / water / sewage info panel since they are a very thin line against a (mostly) green background.

In gereal most problems come with color scales indicating a "good-to-bad" thing done in green-yellow-red. An option for a colorblind mode would be making other kind of color scales, like blue-yellow-red or white-yellow-red. There are a few games that come to mind which have a color blind mode like Civ or FTL (Faster than Light). For me the best two colors to keep apart a blue and yellow.

I think most important is as a game developer to be in contact with colorblind people because they really like color scales that seem "freakish" to people with normal vision. And as it was said before - no recoloring of the world is needed. UI is the key.

[Fry3k]

Originally posted by Cronicma:

But I love the game, and so far my girlfriend has been helpfull when ever I need to place a mine.

Nice to hear this. I call my girlfried to ask for "has the pollution spread to my residential buildings or is it still green?" ;-)

[Comrade Sky]

Originally posted by Total Oh No:

Originally posted by baronjutter:

Sades of colour give hints. When we are placing a mine it would be nice if over our mouse it would tell us what the resource quality % will be before we place it. With my eyes I can tell where a resource deposit is but it's very hard to guess what the result will be. 30%? 90%? It's often a surprise. So just give us the numbers too, more information is always better.

That would be a nice change for everyone. Especially because the radius of a mine is only like half of what is actually shown when you are about to build one.

yes, I have wanted this for so long. It seems like it would be a simple solution. I almost made a clip free mine yesterday as a tester. I might do that tomorrow and upload it as a short term solution for everyone