Graphics and low vision access to Adom?

[dark]

Hi.

I'm Dark, Anyone who has been around the Angband forums might have actually run into me before.

I'd be really interested in playing adom, sinse I'm a major rpg fan, especially rpgs with lots of exploration ad quests. The only miner problem is I am visually impared and have extremely limited vision (I brouse the net and use screen reading software, indeed I couldn't register on these forums until the capture was changed).

My screen reader is fine for reading the status messages in Adom, but not quite as good with ascii text (hereing a long repetition of at at at dash dash percent etc isn't too informative, which is the reason most roguelikes aren't too playable with screen readding programs despite using fairly standard windows text characters). On the pluss side, the look commands and hilighter box in the game work extremely well, sinse you have messages then telling you what you're looking at.

Though normal text is rather too small for me to see, in Angband I found a graphic tyleset of size 16x25, or even 32 x32 pixels, either of which was more than big enough for my vision, and wit my screen reader reading the in game messages, menues etc, Angband was incredibly playable and I've had a lotof fun trying out it's various versions.

Adom looks a great game and just the sort of thing that would interest me, complex mechanics, a detailed world and history, and actual plot and quests to fulfill. However, the one problem is that the text characters to indicate objects are just too small to make the game easily playable. I attempted, but ended up running around terinio not able to tell when I'd found a given person to speak to or not.

Thus, i'd be really pleased to know if there was some sort of graphic tyleset available for Adom, similar to those Angband has, sinse I'd very much like to play the game free of visual irritations. I have downloaded the windows beta 1.4 from the main site, and that has no such options for changing display, but perhaps matters have changed sinse that version was released?

Any advice or recommendations on this would be very much appreciated.

thanks in advance, and hopefully looking forward to seeing many characters meet interesting fates in dark and nasty dungeons!

[anon123]

Hello dark,

winbeta4 doesn't allow you to change the font size without patching the executable. However, using ADOM Sage under Windows, or playing on the server, both let you resize the game font "naturally".

If you don't find the last two options to suit your taste, Vladimir Panteleev has released a patch that lets you change the font and enable the maximize button (only useful to darken the screen :)). Here's the link: http://web.archive.org/web/20050114101920/http://geocities.com/adombot/tweakfont.zip

tweakfont.exe is the program you have to run.

I hope this helps!

[gut]

I remember we had a completely blind player interested in adom a couple of years ago.
He made some posts on usenet, so maybe I'll see if I can dig them up later, to see if he
mentioned some helpful things. I do remember one thing off the top of my head that he
said, dungeon crawl stone soup was the easiest roguelike for a blind player to play. In
crawl, whenever a staircase enters your line of sight, there is displayed the message 'you
see a staircase here'. I think the same sorts of things apply for monsters as well. Add to
that the fact that all crawl messages are highly configurable, so you could customize it
even further.

For ADOM, you really need to download and use sage in order to customize the message
output, but it really is worth the small time it takes to learn to use it. Filtering out message
spam is one of its best uses.

[dark]

Hi.

The way a lot of totally blind players have played roguelikes is using braille displays. These are basically devices that can show 40 characters of braille text by using pins, and have a curser to wander the screen.

The problem is, they're not cheap, ---- over fifteen hundred pounds (or about 2500 dolalrs), of not cheap. Pluss, they only show 40 characters so take a lot of reviewing.

Actually though, it wouldn't take much to make Adom entirely playable just with the text messages it has, sinse the two most crytical things, a directional look feature (this is the one thing Anband was missing), and a hilight curser are already there.

the only thing it would really need is the ability to show direction and distance from player in the status message of each object the hilight curser goes over, --- eg 5 -5 for something that was north west of you, and the ability to list onscreen monsters and items with their directional info.

The ability to jump the curser to nearest monster or item, and a "walk to targited thing" option would also be good, though neither would be essential.

Then I think the game would be playable just with text, indeed there are audio only games that work with roughly the same info, some of them massive stratogy games with huge map overview and hundreds of units.

As to spammy messages, actually they're not a problem imho, sinse afterall my screen reader has a very nice interupt speech function :D.

Also, it wouldn't actually be necessary as I said to work by having a hole bunch of alerts if some numeric and spacial information was in there, ---- audio games certainly don't.

Getting back to Adom though, what the heck is sage? Are there problems using it? The only sage I've ever heard of is the finance and banking software.

Is it based on Java? or does it run through a native windows application. Java unfortunately is utterly inaccessible to screen reading programs due to it using a different toolkit to the native windows one. Sun were building an access bridge which would let java developers build functions to output to some comonly used screen readers into their software, but A, this required specifically supporting by any dev working in Java and wasn't a default thing, B, it was never finished, and c, sinse Sun lost Java it's been utterly abandoned.

@ anon, Thanks for the patch. The only issue I'm having is that as soon as I turn the font up high enough to make a practical difference, ie, 20 or higher, lines of text start getting chopped off the screen, which is a pain.

In Angband I had a similar problem, when the tyle width and font used on text weren't matching, but this was solved nicely with a 32 font for the game that now comes with the 32 x 32 graphic tyle set.

I'm deffinately open to suggestions on this one, sinse the game certainly looks like a lot of fun.

[anon123]

Getting back to Adom though, what the heck is sage? Are there problems using it? The only sage I've ever heard of is the finance and banking software.

Sage is an addon program for ADOM. It adds a variety of useful functions such as message coloring, spam suppresion, macros, and so on. For Linux OS users, there's a version that includes even a very nice starsign selector and stat roller.

Sage is not Java-based as far as I've noticed, it just runs the Linux version of the game (this is necessary due to how it's coded) under Windows to provide its extra functionality. Here's the link if you wish to try it: http://kiserai.net/adom/sage/


the game certainly looks like a lot of fun.

It really is! :)

[dark]

Hi.

Well the good news is sage seems absolutely and completely fine, indeed not that much different to the windows beta as far as the screen is concerned.

I've had a look through the readme and there are certainly some nice options, however I'm afraid I'm not finding any options to change the actual size of the font.

I've read through the readme, and looked at the sage config and msg files, however the only font options I can see are the ones concerning alternatives to the hashes and dots and such, nothing related to size of font more generally.

Am I missing something extremely obvious?

[anon123]

Right-click Sage's titlebar, go to Properties, then click on the Font tab. There you can choose from a few typefaces (more could be added via a registry trick) and their size.

[dark]

Hi.

I found the options thanks, however I managed to break the game :D.

I'll reinstall tomorrow and have another go, sinse it actually does look like a font of 28 or even 36 if I can get that to display on a screen will work (if you have any window settings suggestions let me know).

The actual look of the font doesn't matter, sinse visually I'll just be going by the colour of things (my colour perception is about the only bit of my site that does! work as it's supposed to). it does however very much seem that this will be fixable once I've found the right combination of settings to give me big characters to see.

Thanks a lot for all the help.

[dark]

Hi.

For some reason I stil can't get more text to be displayed on screen when I put the font size up.

I've tried changing the window and layout width, but as far as I can tell it's not making any difference at all, I stil se lines getting chopped off the page.

Any thoughts?

[anon123]

Have you tried resizing the window? Sometimes the area isn't adjusted to match the new font size.

[dark]

Hi.

As I said, I've tried changing the window widt, but it doesn't seem to make any difference, the window still seems the same size. I've also tried maximizing and that didn't work either.

The largest font that seems to fit is 14, which is true either with adom sage or the standard winbeta4.

I've tried playing with that size, but am running into a miner problem with knowing where monsters are, ---- for instance last time I tried terinio I couldn't find tiwatpare (appologies for the spelling), or the tiny girl. This would be fixed if Adom had a couple of the Angband curser functions, like list on screen monsters and jump curser to nearest, but unfortunately these seem things Adom is missing.

[dark]

Hi.

As I said, I've tried changing the window widt, but it doesn't seem to make any difference, the window still seems the same size. I've also tried maximizing and that didn't work either.

The largest font that seems to fit is 14, which is true either with adom sage or the standard winbeta4.

I've tried playing with that size, but am running into a miner problem with knowing where monsters are, ---- for instance last time I tried terinio I couldn't find tiwatpare (appologies for the spelling), or the tiny girl, sinse they just seem to wander about the place at random and actually finding them is pretty difficult. Obviously for quests this would be a killer, even when palying a close range only class like beastfighter. This would be fixed if Adom had a couple of the Angband curser functions, like list on screen monsters and jump curser to nearest, but unfortunately these seem things Adom is missing, so I'm reliant upon my vision and thus a larger font is really what would help here.

Thanks a lot for all the advice, and I appologize for being such a pest.

[Grey]

Hmm, any chance of a screenshot to give some idea of what you mean? And maybe based on that explain what you're trying to do?

Also, in font settings I recommend choosing Lucida Console as it goes to higher font sizes.

Another option is to try and play on the server using Putty, as Putty lets you choose various fonts and sizes. There are some specific set-ups you need to do in Putty to get it working properly with the server though. Also the server can be laggy if you're not in Europe. Some info:

http://ancardia.ath.cx/adom_server_info.txt

Hope that helps!

[JellySlayer]

If you run the DOS version using DOSbox, you can play the game fullscreen. I don't know what font size that would give you, but it's better than the windowed version.

[dark]

Hi.

Thanks for the ideas, unfortunately dosbox and screen readers absolutely don't mix, and I wouldn't be able to read any of the in game text or status messages.

To explain, just because it might be unclear, I have extremely limited vision and cannot read normal text. I can however see where text is by colour.

My screen reading software will handle the actual in game text of Adom, but unfortunately is no use for on screen objects. I am therefore trying to get the ascii graphics displaying the game to a big enough size that I can use my vision to see where stuff is.

this would be usually somewhere around 20 pluss in size. However, once I put the font up to this size, with either adom sage or the tweakfont patch for winbeta4, the window is too small to display everything and stuff gets cut off.

I've tried altering the window size and layout with the properties of adom sage, but as far as can tell this isn't particularly making a difference.

I originally hoped there would be some larger, graphic tyles to display the game the way Angband has, but unfortunately it seems this is not the case, still, thanks everyone for the suggestions, they are appreciated.

[Grey]

There are a couple of applications that may help:

cons2tcod - http://www.roguetemple.com/z/cons2tcod.php
Lets you customise the font more and run in full screen.

NotEye - http://www.roguetemple.com/z/noteye.php
A front-end for roguelikes in general that comes with a small default tileset for ADOM and various customisation and scripting features.

I'm not sure if either of these are compatible with your screen-reader, but maybe worth a look.

[gut]

> I originally hoped there would be some larger, graphic tyles

The problem with 'larger' is that adom's display is 80x25.
That is 2000 tiles in total. So if each tile would be, say,
about 1 square inch, you would need a monitor the size of
a wide screen television to play it.

To my mind, the best solution for you would be a program
called gimespace. I have used it myself when experimenting
with increasing adom tile sizes. It is a bit cumbersome,
but does work. Just use the gimespace tray icon to extend
your console window to enormous proportions, like 3000 x 2000
or such, then set your font to the highest level, i think 72,
then you can just scroll your desktop as though it were a
game that allowed scrolling borders.

Like I say, cumbersome, but it will allow any sized tiles
you want.

[Zeno]

Hi, the author of cons2tcod and NotEye here. I doubt that they currently work with any screen-reader software, as it just display some pixels on the screen, without any readable interpretation. However, I would be happy to help. I currently have no idea about how the screen-reader software works, and whether it is easy to add screen-reader support. Creating a frontend for ADOM which lists all creatures on screen should be possible, though.

Also, I think there is a magnifying glass program in Windows, isn't there? Why don't you use that?