egosoft.com

Hi ALl,

Some of you might recall my previous posts on this forum, expressing an interest in playing the X games despite being totally blind. I spent a couple of months working on that only to burn out quite badly, because I felt like I was running into issues I wasn't sure how to solve, and I was struggling to find a balance between working on the game accessibility and actually enjoying it for its own sake, particularly after I introduced the game to the larger blind gaming community, probably too early.

I think I'm ready to come back now. I wish I could play X4, the newest entry in the series, but since that has a lot of first-person movement I don't think it's as practical for my purposes.

The biggest issues I run into are related to the need to use OCR for game menus. I don't really have a solution for this, and some of the menus are particularly annoying, such as station trading and the property window. Fortunately, scripting can help with the former, and I was just told that the latter is a lot more configurable than it appeared at first.

I just wanted to say hi again, and to hope that there's still a decent-sized community around here to listening to my ramblings. Thanks, all, for the support.

I've got no clue how one would even begin to play something like this without visual input. Basically, situational awareness is essential in the game, and being able to respond to events all around you (or around your assets) will be needed for survival. A few things like docking the player ship can be drastically simplified with a Docking Computer, available at Paranid Equipment Docks, but tracking a moving target that's dodging you amid other distractions seems all but impossible (like capital ship weapons fire against the opposing ship passing dangerously close to you from behind). Other than playing it as a trading game, where you dispatch remotely controlled transports from station to station and try to maintain peace with all factions, it seems like a difficult proposition at best.

As the game advertises: Build, Trade, Fight, Think. The "Fight" part doesn't seem possible, and you'll probably need a lot of "Think" to manage the "Build" and "Trade" parts. I wish you the best of luck with it.