Serious Attempt to get into X4 as a Totally Blind Player

[CaplinCaplin]

Hi All,

So Oasis1701 and I have been messing around with the game; he actually managed to disable a minotaur raider, something I'm still working on. We've been thinking about tweaks that might help us out, and one that seems to be useful is a sticky guidance marker.

That is, when you reach the point where the autopilot disengages due to proximity, the target disappears, and it's a somewhat tedious process to reacquire and try to find it again. It would be nice if it could still keep the marker until manually changed or the object is destroyed, or something.

I'm not sure how difficult this would be to code, nor how might interfere with missions and the like, but thought I'd pass it along anyway

[oasis1701]

It would be great if the AP disengages, target lock would not get lost, so I could re engage the AP again to be able to fire back at my targets.
I was fighting a ship, (using the auto pilot to face it and fire at it), though when i disengaged the AP to turn around and come back at it again, my target lock would lose, and i had to select the enemy ship again and then engage the AP so my weapons would lock on it.

[oasis1701]

(sorry for the spam of questions, as we try to figure this game out)
I managed to find an asteroid that had cilicon in it and managed to aim on it and fire until the asteroid was destroyed.
On my screen I had a text saying "silicon, collect". pressing and holding o did not appear to work, how can I gather/collect the resources?

edit: I managed to find three crystals so far. Is there a way for me to sell these without having to walk on stations and find traders?
I used google to find some answers and it appears that i have to dock with a station and walk through the stations to find traders to sell them.

[CaplinCaplin]

Hi All,

A couple things. Oasis1701 turned me on to a mod called Player Services, which includes the ability to access a lot of station functionality from the map or the interaction menu. This works quite well in my experience, though I'm not sure how to deal with signal or voice leaks accessibly yet. More to the point, the mod appears to give me access to the trader corner, though here is where the problems begin to appear.

As blind players we rely on OCR for reading the game screen, and as demonstrated by previous post in this thread the program we have to work with is rather… Idiosyncratic. It unfortunately flattens the layout of the trade screen, making it very difficult to discern prices, for example. The problem is only made worse by the headers to separate categories of item, which the OCR dumps seemingly at random in the middle of the screen.

I have access to a Mac, which has an alternative OCR system, and that renders the screen much more comprehensibly. It's not practical to play the game on the mac for reasons, not least of which being there's no X4 port for it as far as I'm aware.

To an extent, this is our problem to solve, but it's one example of something which would be made infinitely easier with the addition of text to speech. The OCR is mangling screens which are actually fairly simple, from a visual perspective, at least as far as the info I want is concerned. It's kind of aggravating to be so close to playability and struggling against silly limitations like this.

I'm going to keep exploring and will see if I can find a solution. My workaround with X3 would have been to dump the price list into a file I Could read, but I hope I don't have to do that here.

[oasis1701]

Hi All,

A couple things. Oasis1701 turned me on to a mod called Player Services, which includes the ability to access a lot of station functionality from the map or the interaction menu. This works quite well in my experience, though I'm not sure how to deal with signal or voice leaks accessibly yet. More to the point, the mod appears to give me access to the trader corner, though here is where the problems begin to appear.

As blind players we rely on OCR for reading the game screen, and as demonstrated by previous post in this thread the program we have to work with is rather… Idiosyncratic. It unfortunately flattens the layout of the trade screen, making it very difficult to discern prices, for example. The problem is only made worse by the headers to separate categories of item, which the OCR dumps seemingly at random in the middle of the screen.

I have access to a Mac, which has an alternative OCR system, and that renders the screen much more comprehensibly. It's not practical to play the game on the mac for reasons, not least of which being there's no X4 port for it as far as I'm aware.

To an extent, this is our problem to solve, but it's one example of something which would be made infinitely easier with the addition of text to speech. The OCR is mangling screens which are actually fairly simple, from a visual perspective, at least as far as the info I want is concerned. It's kind of aggravating to be so close to playability and struggling against silly limitations like this.

I'm going to keep exploring and will see if I can find a solution. My workaround with X3 would have been to dump the price list into a file I Could read, but I hope I don't have to do that here.

So I was going to wait for kuertee's accessibility mod updates so that I can manage to get some credits; then after that checking out the UI that shows prices and such.
I think we have two options to solve this; perhaps the integration of the tolk library into the game by the game developers so the screen reader can read the selected items or replacing the UIs with an OCR friendly version, something without columns and tables and just plane text.
It is good to know that we can open the trade menu from the ship with mods though! So is it then possible to show the npc menus and things that's related to station walking?

[CaplinCaplin]

As far as I can tell, we can open conversation with any NPC on the station, as well as do crafting, although I haven’t tried that yet. I am quite sure that modifying all of the screens that struggle with OCR would be quite unlikely, not to mention tedious. The two biggest examples so far are probably the ship upgrade UI and the trade screen, but there will probably be more. it is the situation where items are listed in columns with prices that seems to have particular problems. A lessor example would be the ship info screen, where a lot of data is presented in similar format, though at least it's mostly static. perhaps there is a straightforward way to handle things, although I’m not sure what it is at the moment from the modding side.

[kuertee]

Re: auto-pilot disengaging without the guidance marker getting cancelled ... ... try my mod: Accept Mission For Later Button: https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations ... id=9355323

One of the features I last added to it is: “...v2.0.1, 19 Apr 2021: New feature: Guidance to Position/Object now does not get removed UNLESS you abort or set it somewhere/something else. This allows you to switch missions without the auto-pilot getting interrupted...”

Most of the features of Player Services will be in Accessibility Features mod. But instead of needing the map, it’ll be listed in the context command list when it is expanded as I described in a previous post. NPC interaction however will be limited to when you are near the station or docked, instead of being available from anywhere.

I’ll release the new version later. Was gonna do it last night but my first vaccine jab knocked me out a bit. I’m fine now.

New features include the “Turn to Face X”, Mineable Asteroids list, Mining Regions list, tabbed list. And when you destroy an asteroid it’s dropped items will be moved near your ship. You only need to scoop them up with your tractor beam (by default, “O” key). You won’t need to chase them. My Loot Mining mod is not required, but recommended because it adds asteroid mineral drops as mission targets, which triggers the default mission ping notification.

I was trying to list mission offers data with the stations earlier, but have not found a method to get which stations they are offered. That function requires the map to be open - which is not possible with the custom UI of the Navigation Computer. I’ll just list mission offers as a separate list accessible from a tab.

Thanks for letting us know about the OCR getting confused with tables with columns. I’ll think of something for those types of screens.

As for more complex screens ... e.g. station building and ship configurations ... I was thinking of giving you guys pre-configured stations and ships pulled from the game. E.g. Adding modules to stations will be a click, and the game would just add it, like how the AI builds stations. This would remove the need for you to drag the module into position.

[kuertee]

Here's the new version: https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/748

Spoiler

Show

v1.0.3, 4 Aug 2021:
-New feature: Navigation Computer: tabbed version. Tabs: Points Of Interests, Objects In Sector, Owned Properties.
-New feature: Mineable Asteroid and Asteroid Fields in Points Of Interests list.
-New feature: Navigation Computer command for gates: "Auto-pilot then enter".
-New feature: Navigation Computer command: Target.
-New feature: Interact Menu and Navigation Computer command: "Turn To Face X".
-New feature: Mining: collectable minerals from destroyed asteroids are spawned near the player ship, allowing the player to collect them with the tractor beam without chasing them down.

[oasis1701]

Here's the new version: https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/748

Spoiler

Show

v1.0.3, 4 Aug 2021:
-New feature: Navigation Computer: tabbed version. Tabs: Points Of Interests, Objects In Sector, Owned Properties.
-New feature: Mineable Asteroid and Asteroid Fields in Points Of Interests list.
-New feature: Navigation Computer command for gates: "Auto-pilot then enter".
-New feature: Navigation Computer command: Target.
-New feature: Interact Menu and Navigation Computer command: "Turn To Face X".
-New feature: Mining: collectable minerals from destroyed asteroids are spawned near the player ship, allowing the player to collect them with the tractor beam without chasing them down.

Hi there!
Amazing update! The distances are now being read and the new tab is very cool, will makes things much less confusing! thanks so much, I had some feedback regarding the mod (Which i think caplin will also agree once he checks the mod out)
1. Is it possible to move the unknown ships into a different tabs of its own, so we can browse the "objects in sector" list a little bit easier?
2. Is it possible that the context menu in the navigation computer, becomes its own window? so when i click on an unknown station, the list disappears and it shows me a window with the available options? "auto pilot, target, etc". Just a minor thing. Current implementation works as well.
3. At the moment will the mod show asteroids with crystals or space eggs or items in them? or only minable resources with a mining ship.
4. I think i managed to break the mod; when clicking on navigation computer, nothing comes up anymore. I'll see if i can reproduce it and post a video if you'd like.
Also very glad to know we can be able to trade with station npcs in the future with the mod; I have not installed the player services yet, I thought it is incompatible with version 4 of the game.
I'll paste an OCR result of your mod UI below so you can see what a big difference it made compared to the previous UI.
p.s. I also had my first vaccine shot yesterday and last night it felt like i was ran over by a truck and i was on fire, So much fever.

OCR result:
Objects in sector
Unknown Station (149_95 km)
Unknown Station (162.46 km)
Unknown Station (189.34 km)
Unknown Station (221.53 km)
Unknown Station (243.32 km)
Unknown Station (247.36 km)
Unknown Station (259.68 km)
o-pilot To Unknown Station
Target
Turn TO Face Unknown Station
ore (5.97 km)
Silicon (8.77 km)
Asteroid Fields
Ice (40.12 km)
Unknown Ship (43.05 km)
Unknown Ship (43.6 km)
Unknown Ship (44.58 km)
Unknown Ship (45.3 km)
Unknown Ship (46 km)
Unknown Ship (59.48 km)
Unknown Ship (59.82 km)

[CaplinCaplin]

Hi there,

Excellent indeed. The distances definitely help me both get a sense for the scale of sectors and start some kind of orientation, which I appreciate a great deal. I agree that it would be nice if we could clear the navigation computer interface whenever the context menu comes up, as it would de-clutter the screen for OCR.

I do have a few questions which are a little tangential but still related.

I was trying a couple missions from the offers tab on the map, and noticed that sometimes I'd start guidance, only to have autopilot cutout in the middle of the route and seem to get into some kind of stuck state. Pressing shift=A at that point only results in "Autopilot disengaged," despite the fact that the ship isn't moving and I'm not actually where I want to be.

Is this an autopilot bug? I don't think it's related to the mod but it's still annoying, whatever it is, as I can't follow the visual guidance obviously.

I really appreciate all the work you've done on this. I feel like the playability of the game is growing a bit every day, which is remarkable.

[kuertee]

...
I was trying a couple missions from the offers tab on the map, and noticed that sometimes I'd start guidance, only to have autopilot cutout in the middle of the route and seem to get into some kind of stuck state. Pressing shift=A at that point only results in "Autopilot disengaged," despite the fact that the ship isn't moving and I'm not actually where I want to be...

the auto-pilot will only take you to sectors that you've already discovered.
it will disengage (sometimes without any notifications) if its next intended sector is unknown to you.
when this happens, find a ship that you can communicate with and ask them for directions.

i'll reply to comments specific to the mod later.

[CaplinCaplin]

the auto-pilot will only take you to sectors that you've already discovered.
it will disengage (sometimes without any notifications) if its next intended sector is unknown to you.
when this happens, find a ship that you can communicate with and ask them for directions.

Thanks for explaining this. In future I guess I'll do some manual exploration before trying to tackle missions.

Once we get the navigation menus sorted out, I'm wondering how other issues should be prioritized? I guess there are still fairly big parts of the game that are a bit hard to deal with at the moment, such as station stuff and everything involving EVA/signal leaks/etc. Still, with things as it currently stands I'm at least able to imagine ways they might be handled.

I think that once we're able to reliably do most missions, the experience will open up quite a bit. We're getting there

[oasis1701]

the auto-pilot will only take you to sectors that you've already discovered.
it will disengage (sometimes without any notifications) if its next intended sector is unknown to you.
when this happens, find a ship that you can communicate with and ask them for directions.

Thanks for explaining this. In future I guess I'll do some manual exploration before trying to tackle missions.

Once we get the navigation menus sorted out, I'm wondering how other issues should be prioritized? I guess there are still fairly big parts of the game that are a bit hard to deal with at the moment, such as station stuff and everything involving EVA/signal leaks/etc. Still, with things as it currently stands I'm at least able to imagine ways they might be handled.

I think that once we're able to reliably do most missions, the experience will open up quite a bit. We're getting there

I think we would be able to start having fun in the game once we can find crystals, communicate with traders on stations, talk to npcs for missions and such. I don't know the game very well, but once we can scavenge space for items and then sell them for credits to traders that would be the first activity that we could do in this game!
p.s. we already can loot items that are already dropped in space i believe, they show up as unknown objects in the nav computer

[Erqco]

the auto-pilot will only take you to sectors that you've already discovered.
it will disengage (sometimes without any notifications) if its next intended sector is unknown to you.
when this happens, find a ship that you can communicate with and ask them for directions.

Thanks for explaining this. In future I guess I'll do some manual exploration before trying to tackle missions.

Once we get the navigation menus sorted out, I'm wondering how other issues should be prioritized? I guess there are still fairly big parts of the game that are a bit hard to deal with at the moment, such as station stuff and everything involving EVA/signal leaks/etc. Still, with things as it currently stands I'm at least able to imagine ways they might be handled.

I think that once we're able to reliably do most missions, the experience will open up quite a bit. We're getting there

I think we would be able to start having fun in the game once we can find crystals, communicate with traders on stations, talk to npcs for missions and such. I don't know the game very well, but once we can scavenge space for items and then sell them for credits to traders that would be the first activity that we could do in this game!
p.s. we already can loot items that are already dropped in space i believe, they show up as unknown objects in the nav computer

Unknown objects can be dangerous, mines, laser towers, that could be a problem or fun, I am looking to this post with real admiration, it looks real promising.

[CaplinCaplin]

Hi All,

This is a question related to OCR, particularly irritating behavior I've noticed lately, and I wonder if anyone with vision can shed some light on it.

I sometimes notice when I use the context menu or other menus that my mouse routing to OCR text seems to… Miss the mark, for lack of a better way to explain it. For instance, I will route the mouse to a specific entry in the navigation computer screen, only to click and have nothing obvious happen, no other menu options appear. I'd say it was a UI scaling issue except that the behavior isn't context, and only seems to occur some of the time.

My friend Oasis1701 wondered if the menus float or move around as an animation effect? If so, is it possible to disable this behavior by any chance? I notice that the experience is particularly bad on screens with lots of text, but it's hard to quantify or provide a 100% reproducible test case.

Any help in troubleshooting this particular issue would be very much appreciated. It's definitely the most annoying problem facing me at the moment. Thanks for any thoughts.

[kuertee]

...I sometimes notice when I use the context menu or other menus that my mouse routing to OCR text seems to… Miss the mark, for lack of a better way to explain it. For instance, I will route the mouse to a specific entry in the navigation computer screen, only to click and have nothing obvious happen, no other menu options appear. I'd say it was a UI scaling issue except that the behavior isn't context, and only seems to occur some of the time....

do you remember the name of the entry?
is it a station, or ship? or a gate? or an unknown station? it could be a bug: i.e. the commands its trying to list is invalid for the object.

next version is a bit delayed.

i've hit a snag in the game's 3d-world positioning that i'm trying to sort out. been on it for 3 days (on and off, of course). it will allow you to spacewalk to objects (e.g. repair panels, signal leaks, etc.). currently spacewalk directly from cockpit controls via the navigation computer works. and you can quickly return to your ship's airlock (or a station's airlock) via "Enter Airlock of X". but i'm having trouble positioning the character to smaller objects like signal leaks and repair panels.

by the way, spacewalking is a "warp player into spacesuit to object" - you don't actually have to move to an object.

the next release should include this and npc chatting at stations. these two (along with the asteroid mining in the current version) should give you a good gameplay-loop.

also, i found a bug that the current version doesn't find highways out of a sector. the current version only finds gates out of a sector. have fixed this, and will be included in the next release.

[CaplinCaplin]

do you remember the name of the entry?
is it a station, or ship? or a gate? or an unknown station? it could be a bug: i.e. the commands its trying to list is invalid for the object.

It happens most often with top-level entries of any kind, actually. it's apparently something endemic to the way the game renders certain menus in 3D. According to Reddit, communications and interaction menus are rendered in a way that sometimes produces a "movement," effect, which throws off the OCR because it only takes a single snapshot of the screen and the position of the menu items changes afterwards.

I don't have a workaround for this yet, short of using the game's built-in keyboard support and counting the number of arrow key presses I have to use, which is kind of tedious. As far as I can tell it's just how the game renders things.

I hope that you can come up with as solution for the spacewalking issue. I've been wondering what I can do about signal leaks and related phenomena Thanks as always for all your help.

[oasis1701]

@kuertee thank you! Those updates sound very nice. How possible it is to also use the auto pilot features of the space suit? I'm guessing that it's not very accurate and that's why you're adding the workaround. Although for sure we had difficulties even getting in and out of the suit.

re: menu text, I was wondering if for example the interaction menu text floats and moves around as the camera shakes or when we move our mouse. perhaps there can be a way to prevent or restrict the camera movement when in the cockpit?
Example is, We perform OCR. OCR thinks that in the pixels "450, 800" there is a text saying "navigation computer" while we're trying to click on that, the camera moves or shakes, and the menu item is no longer within those pixels.
IT's what i'm guessing since i can't see what's actually going on. doesn't happen always though. i would say happens for me 20-30% of the time.

[CaplinCaplin]

Yeah, I'm a little confused by the way the OCR behaves here too. I'll try and explain what's going on from my perspective. It doesn't render the game unplayable, but can be kind of annoying sometimes.

I use an NVDA command to run OCR on the game screen. It isn't very selective; it just scans the entire thing and puts all the text it can find into a buffer I can read through. There are ways to make it a little more focused but they aren't really relevant to the question.

I can then route the mouse to the OCR'd text, which is usually a menu item or object I want to navigate in the mod, etc.

HEre's where things get weird. Sometimes, I can click on the item and the context menu opens like I'd expect, below the item. Sometimes it doesn't seem to do anything at all.

Fortunately perhaps, those times when it doesn't do anything I can often press Enter to activate the menu item I wanted anyway. This has lead my friend Oasis1701 to ask if the game's mouse interface requires double-clicking on menu items, a thing I didn't think it did.

I'm wondering if sighted users can "select," a menu item without actually opening it, and if that's perhaps what's happening here? I note that this weirdness only seems to happen with certain game menus, and never others, like the ship interaction/main menu you get when you press Enter.

This isn't as critical as I thought at first, since I can nearly always open the menu I want, but I'm definitely curious what might be happening.

[kuertee]

...re: menu text, I was wondering if for example the interaction menu text floats and moves around as the camera shakes or when we move our mouse. ...

...I'm wondering if sighted users can "select," a menu item without actually opening it, and if that's perhaps what's happening here? I note that this weirdness only seems to happen with certain game menus,...

hey guys, sorry for my brief response below about the screen-menu-mouse behaviour. i'll re-read previous posts then respond to any that i need to at a later time.

some screens (e.g. the interact menu) do move with the ship's momentum. it's actually quite impressive that egosoft was able to make this work this way. and i approve of it.
pity for us players that use the mouse to steer is that it gets cumbersome to use because the menu floats away as you move the mouse - when mouse steering is enabled.
so, i have a mod called Reset Mouse that does several things but includes auto-disabling mouse steering when the Interact Menu is opened, then auto-re-enabling mouse steering when the Interact Menu is closed.
Reset Mouse on Auto-pilot, Menu, and Controller: https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/542

as for full-screen menus (e.g. the map), the mouse-steering is automatically disabled even without my mod.
i don't know if my custom Navigation Computer menu is classed by the game engine as a full-screen menu.
if it's not then it will move with the ship's momentum before stabilising back to the middle.

as for requiring a double-click or an enter ... the Navigation Computer is not coded that way.
all items in it only require one click.

in the new version, which i haven't released yet, the actions are displayed in a new screen - doing away with all the other items in the list.
also, i've enabled keyboard access to the Navigation Computer.
i want to get the other features (e.g. spacewalking, and station navigation to npcs) working before i release the next version.
really sorry for holding you guys up. i'm back on it tonight and tomorrow night (before the weekend).