Help for the color blind

[davypi]

My dad is color blind. With Civ 4 having a reliance on using colors to mark territory borders (as opposed to Civ 2) it makes it more difficult for him to tell where some borderlines are and to whom they belong. Is anybody aware of any "color blind" solutions for playing Civ 4?

[UnOrthOdOx]

Ah....poor guy. I feel his pain.

What kind of color blindness does he have? (specifically which colors?)


Anyway, I myself am colorblind and have had to live with this myself. There is a "color blind help" option, but your actually better off not turning it on, IMO.

Fortunately, units all carry flags, so they should not be difficult to distinguish.

For borders, I highly reccomend modding the art files. The goal being to be able to see WHERE the border IS. In order to see WHO it belongs to, you can select a specific tile and it will bring up a dialog of "X% nation so and so".

It takes some getting used to, but it works.

For myself, I find the Blue Marble graphics easier to distinguish things in. There might be some specific border art mods out there as well.

[snoopy369]

I think the border art might be directly modifiable to have different styles for different colors... not sure, though.

At minimum if he's just red-green colorblind or some other partial colorblind variety, you could mod the xmls to not use the pair of colors he's colorblind to - that's pretty easy. I forget exactly which xml those are in, perhaps one of the files in assets\xml\art\ if I remember correctly. I modified these things in the C4DG mod so it's certainly possible to do.

[davypi]

As far as I know, its not a "normally" diagnosed kind of color blindness (ie red-green). He see Yellow and Red fairly well. Blue is ok if its a strong blue. He can't recognize any secondary colors at all - they either slide towards a primary color or look white.

Anyway, I will try looking for some mods and, if they aren't that hard to do maybe change the banners so that they are more high contrast.

What are the "blue marble" graphics and how does one go about changing to them?

[UnOrthOdOx]

Blue Marble alters all the terrain.

http://www.civfanatics.net/bluemarble/content/index.php

For me, it helps as the borders tend to stand out more.


Sounds a lot similar to my own form of colorblindness. I can typically see the colors just fine. But cannot distinguish SHADES of the same color. Many a time have I been ridiculed for bing unable to tell from a darker orange and a red or navy blue and black.

Never understood why you needed more than about 24 crayons...

Does he wear glasses? A polarized lense can help. The eyedoctors even offered to get me a clear, polarized lense with no perscription back when I was diagnosed. I couldn't be bothered, but did see an immediate difference when looking through one.

[snoopy369]

Shades is low-cone count colorblindness, iirc. Or maybe rods. The one helps you distinguish brightness, the other color; if you universally can't see shades of color then that's probably the problem.

Anyhow, yes, you could probably mod the colors to be more in line with the colors he can distinguish well. It would be easier if he'd not mind having only a subset of civs to play in any one game - you could instead of using 18 different colours, use only 8 or 9 (whatever number he normally plays with) and duplicate those say 9 colors three times throughout the civ universe (for BtS, or 2x for vanilla). Then just make sure not to have two Green civs.

[UnOrthOdOx]

Originally posted by snoopy369
Shades is low-cone count colorblindness, iirc. Or maybe rods. The one helps you distinguish brightness, the other color; if you universally can't see shades of color then that's probably the problem.

Anyhow, yes, you could probably mod the colors to be more in line with the colors he can distinguish well. It would be easier if he'd not mind having only a subset of civs to play in any one game - you could instead of using 18 different colours, use only 8 or 9 (whatever number he normally plays with) and duplicate those say 9 colors three times throughout the civ universe (for BtS, or 2x for vanilla). Then just make sure not to have two Green civs.

Eh, whatever the science behind it.

Once had a job managing inventory for a car lot, keeping tabs on what had been there the longest, which needed markdowns, which needed to be up front for the salesmen to push, and various other tricks to get folks to buy the one you want... Anyway, boss came in all frustrated after my first week as all the cars I had marked coming in all had colors of "red, blue, tan, white, black, grey, etc". He started in on how this one was navy, not blue and that one silver, not grey, etc and so on. That was fun times...but we had someone else log in the colors.

Anyway, on the settings...that's actually a main reason I don't play above normal size maps with only 8-9 civs, actually. Even at random, the chances of getting bad combos is much less. And the few times I do get bad combos, one is inevitably targetted for early destruction.

(I'm also nervous BTS would actually make the problem worse with more civ choices)

[wodan11]

Can't he just crank up the gamma? Or, even easier might be to crank up the contrast or color adjustment on the screen. It'll make all the colors really crazy but it should have the effect of increasing the differentiation between the minor shades.

Wodan

[TriMiro]

I am not color blind, but sometimes I have problems distinguishing shades of colors in Civ. There are so many civilizations in the game, so it is hard to come up with all different colors for all of them.

I am not sure how easy it would be to mod, but empire borders could be changed all together. Use something like the a great wall around each civ's borders, but it would update as the borders expand (also do not give bonus, just use the graphics). That way one ca easily see the border and simply check with mouse which civ's share the border.