Color Blindness and SWTOR

[ReMcDomhnall]

I am color blind...that means I see colors, just not as well as others...some aspects of this game are very challenging (visually)...anyone else have this issue?

[Darth-Malice]

What aspects are challenging?

[ReMcDomhnall]

blue and purple outlines on gear to start with... the shadders on the crew skills or seeing when a mission has changed color on the mission log....cant see the dif between my companion and the bad guys in the mini map... these are the ones i am aware of...sure there are more i havent noticed

[ViperI]

I am colorblind and have a pain of a time with several features. Most notably, the targeting circle that shows around your current target. Basically, I can't see it in certain types of terrain (snow being the worst) because it is too transparent. Playing a tank class, this is a real pain in the heehoo.

 

WTB option for opaque targeting circles.

[ReMcDomhnall]

Viper, I am wondering if the new UI will have features that let you tweak different things on the game...the target circle would be a great one. I aslo just learned that color around an enemies pic changes to a different color when some else, not in your group, started the fight with them...I was unaware of this until last week. I simply didnt notice because i have a hard time seeing the different colors on elites and such...I usually read the describtion of the enemy and check out his HP before attacking

[Khalirei]

I'm not colorblind, but the really bright neon text hurts my eyes really bad and the small font just blurs together. I wish they could add a color blind mode, and a mode that de-saturates font colors.

[ViperI]

Viper, I am wondering if the new UI will have features that let you tweak different things on the game...the target circle would be a great one. I aslo just learned that color around an enemies pic changes to a different color when some else, not in your group, started the fight with them...I was unaware of this until last week. I simply didnt notice because i have a hard time seeing the different colors on elites and such...I usually read the describtion of the enemy and check out his HP before attacking

 

That would be nice, but I'm not holding my breath. I had a really in-depth feedback post during beta, back when they actually had an optional colorblind mode. In the next build of the game, they had removed the colorblind option completely so you can see how far my feedback made it.

[Loreki]

blue and purple outlines on gear to start with... the shadders on the crew skills or seeing when a mission has changed color on the mission log....cant see the dif between my companion and the bad guys in the mini map... these are the ones i am aware of...sure there are more i havent noticed

 

Gear will also be marked the name of its colour class i.e. [Prototype] for blue.

 

The colours on crew skills is a bit of a challenge but you may find arranging it by level, not difficulty helpful. The ones at the top of the list will then be the ones that grant levels - though sadly you may still have an issue near the cutoffs.

[Valhorth]

Also colorblind and I've had many situations where I didn't see certain things or didn't notice them.

 

I have a problem with these colors:

yellow -> green

gray -> pink

all types of blue

red -> brown -> black

 

Me and sorting out a coloring set is not going to happen.

 

I have a very big problem with red, for instance, the red marker you can put on targets, I simply have a very hard time seeing it. If the background they're up against is black or almost black, they dissapear completely. The targetting arrow above your target is also part of this problem. I rely more on where my spells are flying to to identify my current target.

The differences between the blue and purple is non existing for me, even when I put them next to each other, I don't see any difference whatsoever. The overall blueish (I hope it's that) UI and the neon glows don't help either.

Then there's the AoE effects from either fellow players or mobs, in certain terrains, and especially on the snow terrains everything gets more challenging.

I've also missed many archeology gathers, they show up on the map but I don't see them easily. I'm like: What? Where is it? I go stand there, zoom in and start scruteneering the area around me to finally find that little corner sticking out of the ground, almost invisible to me and mostly detectable by the mouse cursor changing. In other cases I dismiss the gathering spot as being bugged and give up after a short time.

 

In WoW I have the option of changing many colors through UI addons and self made changes in the UI files. This has helped me a lot over the years and helped me identify things on a much easier scale. I still do have problems with gathering herbs in Stranglethorn for example, hard to spot them between the other vegetation.

 

An option in the (near) future to be able to customize some of the UI elements in terms of colors or be able to reduce/remove the neon glow borders can already be a very big improvement for us colorblind people.

If SWTOR used the same kind of UI files like WoW, I'd have done the needed changes myself already.

[Jedislayerr]

I'm not colorblind, but the really bright neon text hurts my eyes really bad and the small font just blurs together. I wish they could add a color blind mode, and a mode that de-saturates font colors.

 

yah on hoth i had the same problem it was so bright it hurt my eyes and i had to stop playign every so often

[ReMcDomhnall]

An option in the (near) future to be able to customize some of the UI elements in terms of colors or be able to reduce/remove the neon glow borders can already be a very big improvement for us colorblind people.

If SWTOR used the same kind of UI files like WoW, I'd have done the needed changes myself already.

 

me too...I think I would fine if I could tweek the colors a little bit

[Jassy]

I can empathise. Whilst I'm not, strictly speaking, colour blind, I am registered as severely sight-impaired/blind and there are some shades and colour combinations that I can't identify, regardless of whether they're static or animated. I'd personally like to be able to increase the cursor size and change its colour and slow its speed down even more (I can't see my cursor when there's a lot going onscreen unless it's over something quite static, like my quickbar). and be able to change the chatbox font type as well as the size and colour of the cutscene text.

 

Maybe I shouldn't complain lol... the in game world is still far, far, easier for me to see than the outside world!

 

/Jas

[Ageizm]

What causes color blindness?

[ReMcDomhnall]

From Wikipedia:

 

Color blindness or color vision deficiency is the inability or decreased ability to see color, or perceive color differences, under lighting conditions when color vision is not normally impaired. "Color blind" is a term of art; there is no actual blindness but there is a fault in the development of one or more sets of retinal cones that perceive color in light and transmit that information to the optic nerve. Color blindness is a sex-linked condition. The genes that produce photopigments are carried on the X chromosome; if some of these genes are missing or damaged, color blindness will be expressed in males with a higher probability than in females because males only have one X chromosome (in females, a good gene on only one of the two X chromosomes is enough to yield the needed photopigments.

 

To get a better understanding of all the chromosome BS...check this link out. In the examples shown, both picture appear to be identical, at least to me:

 

http://mattwilcox.net/archive/entry/id/513/

[Ageizm]

From Wikipedia:

 

Color blindness or color vision deficiency is the inability or decreased ability to see color, or perceive color differences, under lighting conditions when color vision is not normally impaired. "Color blind" is a term of art; there is no actual blindness but there is a fault in the development of one or more sets of retinal cones that perceive color in light and transmit that information to the optic nerve. Color blindness is a sex-linked condition. The genes that produce photopigments are carried on the X chromosome; if some of these genes are missing or damaged, color blindness will be expressed in males with a higher probability than in females because males only have one X chromosome (in females, a good gene on only one of the two X chromosomes is enough to yield the needed photopigments.

 

To get a better understanding of all the chromosome BS...check this link out. In the examples shown, both picture appear to be identical, at least to me:

 

http://mattwilcox.net/archive/entry/id/513/

 

Very interesting thank you.

[Horanax]

I am not color blind and have no idea if this would help or not but just putting it out there in case.

 

Try turning on enemy health bars if you haven't so that way you see their health above their heads along with their names. When you have this feature active it puts a small arrow pointing downwards over the head of whatever target you have selected. The color is red. Don't know if this would help some who were having an issue with targeting. If so great, if not sorry I couldn't be of more help.

[stubtoe]

Me, Im red/green color blind.

The only problems Ive had are just the yellows/greens, they are too close in shades for me to tell apart.

But as far as I can remember I havent run into any situations where not being able to tell them apart has caused me issues.

[RedPands]

Sorry double post. Edited January 29, 2012 by RedPands

[RedPands]

OMG I have the same problem. People are like go for the purple target and im like u mean the blue one? And when I have an item thats like blue I sometimes think its a purple and whatnot.

It is very hard to play this game with colorblindness.

I can see colors but I dont see them as well as others

I get

Yellow and green mixed up

Purple and blue

Green and brown.

Pink and purple (Depending on the shade)

Black and brown (If brown is really dark)

[Jaigh]

I'm red/green colour blind and i do have a few problems seeing things too. what people forget with my type of colour blindness is that purple is made of RED and blue so telling teh 2 apart can be tricky such as group memebers icons on teh blue map back ground. there's been a few times when questing with my g/f i've been like "where are you?" and she'll go "look at your map" and i have to resist teh urge to face palm her lol.

 

I don't expect games to have colour blind modes though as it's not that common and i can normally muddle through with someones help and remembering that a particular shade of "blue" is actually purple.

 

if they do a colourblind mode though please make it better than WoW's colour blind mode it would have been offensive if it wasn't so laughably bad.

[OldSwab]

Picking one of many colorblind threads to bump looking for some sort of feedback.

 

For me, I can deal with almost all of it, but I can -NOT- look at my Ops panel bar and tell who needs heals without putting my nose on the screen, and then its still kinda' dicey. It's a bit better (not great) in FP's.

 

Seriously, why does THE MOST IMPORTANT team stat in the entire game appear as a 1/4" red 2pt weight bar on a black background? How about white on blue? How about black on white? Why is the energy bar neon and the health bar dirt over asphalt? How many of your team mates really need to know how much energy you have, more than they need to know your health level?

 

That's really, really terrible, to quote our good friend from Huttball, Baron Deathmark! It absolutely kills my ability to heal in full Ops groups. I have to track where my teammates are and wait for them to tell me they're going down.

 

So please, "Show us what you've got, Rottworms!" Loving your game, I really do...but help me not to quit in frustration. That's something that's highly likely to happen when my guild starts doing Ops HM's and I start losing Ops members because their healthbar has the same visual distinctiveness as dog poop in a pothole on a moonless night in November. It really, really is just mush on mush in its current state, and tiny, tiny mush in a full ops group.

 

P.S. Any colorblind people out there figure out how to "fix" your screen to make the red health bars not suck so much in this game?

Edited February 22, 2012 by OldSwab