Color Bind Switch

[jbdenney]

I am wondering about the "-colorblind" switch. I am red-green color blind and that makes a lot of the menu indicators (green/yellow/orang/red) every hard to see. I tried adding -colorBlind to the startup shortcut and I don't see any difference.

My full command line is...

"C:\Matrix Games\War in the Pacific Admiral's Edition\War in the Pacific Admiral Edition.exe" -wd -r -skipVideo -px1680 -py1050 -altFont -deepColor -dd_sw -colorBlind

[MakeeLearn]

It just makes ALL text white. NO OTHER COLOR.

[geofflambert]

If it's actually supposed to be "-colorblind" then "-colorBlind" would be ignored.

[geofflambert]

Just checked. It is "-colorBlind". Did you copy and paste that command line in your post?

[geofflambert]

This from the Ministry for Funny Walks:

[jbdenney]

The command line above was a copy/paste of the command line I used in my shortcut.

When I tried "-colorblind" the one place I looked was in the Ground unit report. Along the top where you selected which nation's units are display I still had my original problem. I saw nothing different.

I understand that to display a nation's units you click on the name and I suppose the name turns green. If you click it to yellow it does not show that nations units. Those entries were still colored.

My problem is that I cannot distinguish between the two colors in the list. At best in good light there is a slight difference in brightness. I have to select "all units" until all of the units disappear from the display. I can then click a single nation and see only its units.

This is true on every click to select list in the game. Also when supply level warnings shifting between green, orange and red are almost impossible for me to see.

[geofflambert]

.

[geofflambert]

Are you using the -altFont switch? That's a little bigger and easier on our old eyes and might help you a tad.

[geofflambert]

Have you tried fiddling around with the contrast? Also I think there's a way to substitute colors but you'd likely want to be using 16 bit colors rather than 32 (don't use the -deepColor switch).

[geofflambert]

Have you tried anything like these:

[geofflambert]

I suppose you'd have to play the game in Windows mode for this to work.

[witpqs]

ORIGINAL: geofflambert

.

A general note about switches. When an invalid switch is encountered (because it's misspelled or whatever) it does what's called "fails silently". In other words the game does not complain or crash and burn, it just ignores the invalid switch. That's good because it won't stop you from starting up the game, and the drawback is that you have to check manually to make sure whatever switch you used is doing what you want. For example -archive will cause the game to save all the report files for every turn in SAVE\archive (required for Intel Monkey, BTW!), but -Archive or -ARCHIVE are not understood by AE and do nothing. So if you made a spelling error reports would not be saved, and if you did not check until 10 turns later you will be missing a bunch of reports.

[MakeeLearn]

...

[BBfanboy]

ORIGINAL: MakeeLearn

...

Try staring at something very red for a couple of minutes, then look at the image et voilà! You see green!

[jbdenney]

I appreciate the suggestion of Visolve and it does make the colors more legible for me. The issue is that if you click on the screen the correction goes away.

I always have issues with game designers who do not think about color blindness. I loved "World in Flames" but the colors of some of the national counters looked the same to me. I cannot remember for sure but I seem to remember that the worst issue was distinguishing the US from the Italians. I know that when you have a lot of nationalities or need for color schemes it can be difficult to come up with combinations that do not have issues but I remember I had no issues with "War in Europe" since it was a combination of Counter color and Symbol color so of the background color looked the same I knew that counters for Nation A had a white unit symbol and Nation B had a black unit symbol.

And yes, before anyone points it out, I know that variations in the color characteristics between different computer monitors make the problem even worse.

[geofflambert]

They should, when wanting emphasis put the text in italics or bold or all caps as well as use color.