Chroma: Ubisoft's internal tool used to simulate color-blindness
github.com
github.com
I don't see it being referenced anywhere but maybe I'm mistaken.
And works cross platform.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chromatic-vision-simulator/id3...
It's free. I'm unaffiliated, just a happy user in the past.
The problem with their games is in being such big tent trying to appeal to everyone (note I’m not talking about accessibility, which is a totally different axis), they feel too smoothed out and have very little interesting to say, and their games just aren’t that much fun.
It reminds me of that article posted on HN the other day saying that often our weaknesses and strengths are two sides of the same coin.
Video games are not meant do be productive, they are meant to be fun, and standardization is boring. It means that they can't completely rely on OS frameworks to make an appealing game, it means that accessibility needs first hand consideration.
Simply because working on very tight budget likely 12/6 is how indie games are made. And to be honest in modern economy having any budget at all is kind a success already. So I'd belive most of small games are built on enthusiasm and founders own money.
Vast majority of "indie" games budgets are in range of $100,000 and $300,000 total. Over that amount there is gap where no one invest except few rich, successful and picky publishers. Getting more funding for a small-scale project is extremely hard so if your game needs more then it's must be AA project for at least $2,000,000+ budget. But AA+ means $40+ price tag, completely different production quality and large team so very few kind of games fit the math.
PS: I co-founder of a small gamedev studio and I know quite a few other people in this industry.
PSS: I'm happy to be wrong though. So if you know how to get game funded I have 4 cool playable prototypes to build into a game, team of 10+ devs and we track record for 3 released titles including one for consoles.
Also, like another poster mentioned, there already exists a host of creativity in these AAA companies, that’s not the problem. The problem is making something that will reliably keep the company in the black.
Because they don't have to. In most cases, to have a large successful game, developers need publishers. Publishers are who negotiate with Steam or Gog or EA. Publishers are who figure out in the in-game microtransaction economy. Publishers are who do all the promotional activities like getting famous streamers to play the game.
The gaming community never seems to understand this. Who they think of as "the devs" are often actually the publisher.
AAA is going to regress toward slop as the number of cooks in the kitchen increases, not just counting people who work directly on the game but investors, members of the ESG committee from the bank issuing loans to the studio, etc.
The next bellwether: Bungie's Marathon (2025). Marathon (1994) was a neat game that expanded upon "Doom-likes" as they were called with new engine features, multiplayer modes, and (gasp!) lore that you could unlock. It was specific. It had a vision. Marathon (2025) is a multiplayer-only, generic characters, generic settings, generic objectives. Basically Sony is turning Bungie into a dumping ground for devs on the failed Concord.
Just the first one that comes to mind.
Other than that we are sane, Hungary+Ireland is not that much
Abortion rights in Ireland are OK, I was living with old prejudices. The number of doctors that perform it is still low, but fair enough - I was all wrong.
(unfortunately I cannot update my comment)
Abortion rights in Ireland are OK, I was living with old prejudices. The number of doctors that perform it is still low, but fair enough - I was all wrong.
(unfortunately I cannot update my comment)
The whole concept of DEI / woke is not much of a thing outside the English-speaking world. Very small parts of it (gender parities, a bit more transgender awareness, the "transgender athletes in sports" kerfuffle) have leaked through, but that's it. Where I live (Poland), most people, even well-educated people, haven't ever heard of the concept of specifying your pronouns.
"Slept" as the opposite of "woke", right? This is genius! Is something actually used by more people?
How about Ubisoft work with Sony/Microsoft/Valve and get vision and hearing disability implemented at the device level rather than harassing abled users every new game which I'm sure through this frustration is contributing in some small way to these anti-intellectual movements against accessibility.
I imagine if you can’t perceive some colours, you want hue shift or boost, not to actually remove colours so it looks like what you already are seeing. Feels a bit like muting all sounds to help one with auditory deficiencies. What am I missing here?
To give the benefit of doubt: maybe it's a simulator that the dev used for testing that got left in production ?
https://www.gamersexperience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/...
The red and green icons are still prominently there. If one is red-green blind, shouldn’t those icons be any other hue than green and red?
For example, in this case presumably the QA team play in different modes and provide feedback about things which aren't going to work, but that is a very different universe than web or mobile app design.
That's more subtle to test.
Does it mean that trees also look reddish to you?
I don't understand how cardinals can look "obviously red" and still blend in with the foliage, which average people would consider "obviously green". My mental model for red-green color blindness is that most reds and most greens are hard to tell apart because they largely look like shades of yellow.
It is hard to explain because much of our modern signage and whatnot has been designed with colorblindness in mind; most "green" traffic lights, for example, are green-whitish specifically to address colorblindness. But not all of it; when I used to work in IT (as in literal computer diagnostics) it was pretty impossible for me to ascertain any particular diagnostic light.
- Part of my colorblindness seems to be a language thing, especially as a non native speaker of English: is that status light "amber" or is it just on? (here it it obviously helps if there is a full rack and one of them sticks out)
- another part is about recognizing the colors of tiny dots (lanterns, specks on the floor). I can sometimes clearly see the same color if there is a cm^2 or a m^2 of it, no problem, but a tiny dot of the same color looks generic grey or generic yellow
- and another part, probably related to the first one, is just noticing: for example the mixed waste bins are (very dark) green but until my wife thought I joked I didn't notice. Now it is very obvious
- then there is the obviously actual color blind part: when a doctor hands me the color splatters with images I don't see every one of them and on some I see the wrong numbers
- another obvious clue there is something I actually cannot see: when I use colorblind simulation in digital image manipulation programs it feels like nothing happens
- bonus 1: my house is clearly (IMO) green, but sometimes this has other people including people with supposedly full color vision confused, which means either I see the green because it isn't drowned in another nuance that other people see or there is something even funnier going on with my color vision
- bonus 2: It feels like it is never pitch dark for me, as long as I am outdoors. (Caves, bunkers and technical rooms without lights can be though.)
Here's an example photo I took in a tulip field with spots of emerging red flowers in a sea of green: https://i.imgur.com/44VRERI.jpeg
I can see the flowers if I look at them, but if I hold the picture in my peripheral vision away from my focal center, I don't register the spots of red in the back of the field.
What tends to happen with anamolous trichromats is that the brain compensates in a bunch of different ways. Lightness contrast sensitivity goes up, color contrast sensitivity goes up, and your brain "alters" the perceived colors closer to what a color normal person would perceive. The brain is mostly able to compensate for the reduced functionality to the point where you might not even know you're colorblind until you do color matching tests. This doesn't fix everything though, and this happens to be a common weakness for deutans.
It to enable dynamically generated UI palettes that also were numerically verifiable as accessible.
The way I model color blindness for a quick & cheap heuristic is, remove all hue-ness and saturation-ness. i.e. make the scene black and white.
That elides the exact compression in hue that is experienced by an actual individual (i.e. is it just red on green that's a problem? tetrachromate or x or y or z? at what severity (this is ~unmeasurable)) and leaves you with the raw problem, that there isn't sufficient contrast between the two colors.
Even though this elides information about the individual's exact experience, it is crucial for how to think about color, because even if color blindness didn't exist, it still would affect all of us
A cheap example of that is #FF0 text on a white background. Yellow is absurdly close to white (IIRC 97 L* versus 100 L*), so you can never quite focus on the yellow, it feels like its slippery and you get a headache trying to read.
(w/the tree x cardinal example, red is ~43? L*. A natural green w/o an absurd sunlight behind it would be somewhere around 55 L*. You want about 40 L* for good contrast, here we have ~10 L*, and once you lose the hue/saturation delta due to color blindness, it's quite difficult for the bird to "jump out", as it were. you could still find it scanning)
This is specific to the person, so there's no real way fix for everyone beyond turning everything into extreme differences like pure black and white. It's just something to note about the limits of it as an accessibility technique.
However, to properly screen for color vision deficiencies requires calibrated spectra. Thus, even a color-calibrated monitor is insufficient, since color calibration assumes that the standard cone response functions are valid, which isn't the case for anomalous trichromats (which encompasses the most common types of colorblindness). This is why screening, such as with the HRR test, is done with plates printed with spectrally-calibrated inks in controlled lightning conditions (again with a known spectrum).
> Work on all games. No dependency on any specific game or engine.
So your solution isn't an alternative here since it requires modifying the engine/game code.
This sentence is an oxymoron...
Once you inject code, you have modified the original code. That isn't always possible or desired.
If you take 2 minutes to read the user guide of both softwares, the difference is obvious.
Reshade requires you to select the game executable and inject tools into the executable. It is specifically built to be compatible with all the major graphics drivers.
Chroma does not require you to point to the game and seems sit on top of the whole screen. I assume it just captures the screen and applies transformations to it at the surface level.
> Reshade requires you to select the game executable and inject tools into the executable
> Chroma does not require you to point to the game
Did we read the same user guide? As per Chroma's:
> Right-click on the Chroma window to get the menu list of all applications which are running on the PC.
> Select the application which you want to capture from the menu list
You're right the implementation is different. Reshade injects itself into a games rendering pipeline, while Chroma seems to read the screen (or a window, I can't really tell from the code) and create a window which shows a region of the screen with the shader applied.
In both scenarios a QA person could work with a generated build of the game and apply colorblind shaders on top of it, without having to ask a dev to add 'colorblind testing mode'.
What would've been more useful here would be a color blindness compensation filter, but IIRC there are already tools that can do just that for the whole screen.
It's not hard to come up with more examples.
It seems simpler to make an OBS plugin that way you are able to reuse a lot of work that already exists for game capture and post processing.
Also, at no point does it look like they are actually recording anything. Just screenshots.
https://github.com/ubisoft/Chroma/blob/main/Release/Chroma_s...
It's a little bit like when projects include their dependencies instead of just listing them in a gemfile etc. Some hate that, but it can make things easier.