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]

Re: Civ3 Patch - Red/Green Colorblindness

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.