Let's talk about readability, color and colorblind issues. What are we doing? What's going on here?
TL;DRReadability is harder than expected because diegetic UI is affected by exposure and lighting; vehicle HUDs and MFDs still need work, and colorblind and font-size settings are planned, helped by data-driven UI.
Well, readability, yeah. It's not as straightforward to solve as we thought it would be. We have a constant battle with this, partly to do with exposure compensation, i.e. when something's super bright, your eye adapts to that brightness and changes the brightness levels of the scene. Obviously there's the problems of drawing some coloured text onto a black background, i.e. a starry night, and then all of a sudden you're on a snowy backdrop. How do you compensate for that? We've still got a few more irons in the fire, especially on vehicle HUDs, about what we're going to do to solve this, and not just drop shadow. I think what we've got on the lens now on the AR stuff is really going in the right direction. It still needs tweaking, but we're pretty happy with that. But we've still got issues with the head-up displays that are on vehicles, and the exposure compensation on MFDs we still need to look into. But yeah, it's weirdly tricky. The more diegetic you are, the more you sort of buy into the idea that these things are in-world and you're not cheating and you're not just drawing over the top of the screen with some flat UI. I used to work on driving games years and years ago, and you draw the world and you draw the car and then you draw a HUD flat over the top, and that would be crystal clear and you could see your lap time and stuff, whereas this is entirely different. As soon as you put stuff in the world, it can be at angles and the sun can shine on it or a big shadow goes across it. Even your mobile phone has a lot of exposure compensation. Your eyes have exposure compensation, but phones have exposure compensation, so if you bring it out in direct sunlight, it's super bright, and if you get it out under the covers in bed, it's all dark and stuff. I don't know why you'd be getting out your phone under covers in bed, but maybe that's just me.
But in the future, yeah, we do want settings for colorblindness and we do want settings for being able to set font sizes and so on, but that's...
Accessibility is a completely offshoot of this where, yeah, I think it's one in 12 males have some form of colorblindness, and some of the colors we've chosen don't really work with people that suffer certain types of colorblindness problems.
No, and again, we have all of the different manufacturers and so on, different styles for every ship. So it's like, oh yeah, this ship works great. And then another one, you didn't at all understand that you were dying or whatever.
Well, I blame the manufacturer. But in all seriousness, yes, we're going to put the settings in that will combat that problem, but also accessibility options for changing the font sizes. This obviously has an impact on the sort of graphic design look that we initially have, but essentially it will become usable for people that have issues reading the font sizes or the particular colours that maybe that manufacturer uses. So yes, yes, yes, and yes again for options to help people with colorblindness, or for font size accessibility options as well.
In addition to that, as we start really converting all of the legacy UI into Building Blocks or new tech, it's all fully data-driven now, so that makes it much easier to just transform values where we need to, like inject a scaler if you want to have bigger fonts or lower-sized fonts, and also colors. It's all data-driven, so it makes that much easier. It's not static anymore.