Factorio Forums

Hello Team of Factorio,

i saw the game, i bought it, and i think it is really interesting.
BUT... i have a serious problem:
I cann not see clearly red / green wires, especially when the ground is gras.
Is there a point in the Menu - or a point somewhere in some Ini-File - where can choose the colors for those?
As i am daltonic have problems with red and green color in a certain range.
Beeing able to change red wire to blue - and green wire to yellow, would allow me,
to fully enjoy the game.

Thank you for any reply
best regards,
Tarsuss

There are quite a number of suggestions of special colorsets for colorblind people. The devs know there is demand for that. At the moment, it can be modded, I guess colorblind friendly colorset might get added later on, if the devs can get to it.

Koub wrote:There are quite a number of suggestions of special colorsets for colorblind people. The devs know there is demand for that. At the moment, it can be modded, I guess colorblind friendly colorset might get added later on, if the devs can get to it.

Doubtful. It's basically doubling the graphics work for not much gain.

We are becoming more aware of people with color vision deficiency, so I think we might eventually spend some time making the game more colorblind friendly. There are some mods, that try to solve this, so we might take inspiration from them.

Well thank all of you for the reply.

May i ask where i shall look for the so mentioned mod?

For the use of combinators it will be a great help.

I thank you already for considering people with such color vision deficiency, like me.

Best regards
Tarsuss

i Think for the time beeing this Post:
viewtopic.php?p=216709#p216709

will make my experience with Factorio much more likable.

Have a nice day everybody

Regards
Tarsuss

Some links to mods, a way to change the colors in vanilla.
Colorblind Texture Pack

Added to viewtopic.php?f=80&t=22760 Support for Color Blinds / Better Visibility ...

In my eyes support for colorblind is in every case useful for better visibility.

According to this Wikipedia article, about 7% of males of North European descent have a red-green color blindness. Therefore, I do consider it appropriate that the game should be made playable also for such people, at least as a configurable option.

However, there are also several other forms of color blindness, which are less common. These are also explained in the Wikipedia article. I doubt it would be feasible to make the game playable for all forms of color blindness.

I also suffer from a form of red-green colorblindness, specifically "deuteranopia". There are many kinds of colorblindness, as mentioned, but most forms result in the inability to distinguish between red and green. The second most common form is the inability to distinguish between blue and yellow. A complete lack of ability to perceive any one color is rare, and monochrome vision even more so.

I am currently able to play only by reading the text description for some items, both when I want to place an object or check an existing one. I'm fairly limited in working with the circuit network, which is a shame, as I feel that would be a big part of the game's appeal.

One fix I can suggest to the developers that may tackle much of the problem may be to focus more on the lightness or darkness of the objects rather than the color. Being colorblind usually means one becomes slightly better at distinguishing subtle differences in shading. The second option may be patterning, such as stripes or other visual cue for the circuit network wires. To some degree, I already take advantage of this effect in the case of plain inserters and stack inserters. I cannot distinguish the color difference, but I can see that the stack inserter has a larger hand.

Another major point to mention is the wires. Not only are the red and green wires hard to distinguish from each other, the plain power wires are just the wrong shade of brown. To us, they all appear that exact shade of brown. If given the option, I would prefer them darker brown or black, so they also don't blend into the terrain; sometimes I also have trouble telling if my power poles connect when over dirt or grass.

All of this post is in regards to version 0.15

Currently, there are only a few things in game that I cannot distinguish by shading. If it's any help to the developers, I'll note them here:

• Red, Green, And Brown Wires (All appear light brown)
• Plain / Stack Inserters (Both appear the same yellow/tan)
• Fast / Filter Inserters (Both appear blue)
• Requester /Active Provider Chest (Both appear blue)
• Efficiency / Productivity module (Both appear light brown/tan)
• Cannon Shell / Explosive Shell (Both appear brown)
• Personal Roboport / Roboport Mk2 (Both appear yellow/tan)
• Heavy / Light Oil (Can just barely distinguish based on shade, usually only when side by side, both appear brown)
• Heavy Oil / Lubricant (Shading is too similar to distinguish)

Also, there are a few things I have no trouble distinguishing, despite the red/green difference.

• Red / Green Circuits (Colors are vibrant enough to distinguish, and the red appears much darker than the green)
• Red / Green Research Packs (same as circuits)
• Belt Colors (Appear as yellow > brown > blue)
• Blue / Purple Research Packs (while both appear blue, the blue appears much lighter than purple in shade)
• Inventory Icons for red/green wire (Again, same as circuits. Appears as more vibrant and different shade, until actually placed)
• Long inserter (Vibrant / Dark enough to see a bit of red, also looks darker than the rest)

I don't actually have any experience in color correction for color blindness, but here's an idea that should be fairly easy to implement and generic...

So, basically, how you transform a color depends mostly on hue, right?
Let's say we represent every pixel as HSV values. Then you may define three Lua functions, one maps (hue, saturation) pair to new saturation, second maps (hue, brightness) pair to new brightness, and third just maps hue to new hue.
Make those three functions user-defined, and precompute each as a lookup table (for 8b components, that's 64kB+64kB+256B).
Then, apply those mappings on the entire screen as a pixel shader, and let users and modders worry about particular color mappings for particular disorders, without changing any graphics at all!

Does that sound too crazy?

it'd just be plain old useful for there to be a program that will turn what's on screen into something different if you're colour blind cycling RGB or swapping RB RG or GB in different games or different situations might help you and it may not look natural or right to us Neurotypicals but if it helps you that's good, the same program might be able to help epileptics by softening abrupt transitions on the fly or reducing the intensity difference during strobing effects and more. It's a program that wouldn't just help this game but all games and even the ability to watch some movies for people with visual disabilities.

The bonus about it being a plain RGB swap is that no new sprites would be necessary run the program as normal and just remap the colour space by adding some Hue value or inverting the Hue or a combination of the two. Again the intention isn't for it to look as natural in this mode as in the normal mode but for it to be functional for those who need it, and if it means that mode A only helps distinguish between wires for one person but the same person uses mode B for inserters and C for assembly machines that's no worse than having different map overlays in other games to help see other values better.

(oh and one thing I've seen that helps in other games is letters on the sprites just 1 letter even if it's no obvious link like C R and G for Copper Red and Green wires, is enough to be able to identify them and you learn the association over time the same way as with the colours)

jzr wrote:I don't actually have any experience in color correction for color blindness, but here's an idea that should be fairly easy to implement and generic...

So, basically, how you transform a color depends mostly on hue, right?
Let's say we represent every pixel as HSV values. Then you may define three Lua functions, one maps (hue, saturation) pair to new saturation, second maps (hue, brightness) pair to new brightness, and third just maps hue to new hue.
Make those three functions user-defined, and precompute each as a lookup table (for 8b components, that's 64kB+64kB+256B).
Then, apply those mappings on the entire screen as a pixel shader, and let users and modders worry about particular color mappings for particular disorders, without changing any graphics at all!

Does that sound too crazy?

This sounds like a perfect solution to me; best of all, it would cover all forms of colorblindness to the best of my knowledge. It would definitely work for me

JohnyDL wrote:it'd just be plain old useful for there to be a program that will turn what's on screen into something different if you're colour blind cycling RGB or swapping RB RG or GB in different games or different situations might help you and it may not look natural or right to us Neurotypicals but if it helps you that's good, the same program might be able to help epileptics by softening abrupt transitions on the fly or reducing the intensity difference during strobing effects and more. It's a program that wouldn't just help this game but all games and even the ability to watch some movies for people with visual disabilities.

The bonus about it being a plain RGB swap is that no new sprites would be necessary run the program as normal and just remap the colour space by adding some Hue value or inverting the Hue or a combination of the two. Again the intention isn't for it to look as natural in this mode as in the normal mode but for it to be functional for those who need it, and if it means that mode A only helps distinguish between wires for one person but the same person uses mode B for inserters and C for assembly machines that's no worse than having different map overlays in other games to help see other values better.

(oh and one thing I've seen that helps in other games is letters on the sprites just 1 letter even if it's no obvious link like C R and G for Copper Red and Green wires, is enough to be able to identify them and you learn the association over time the same way as with the colours)

One of the main problems with swapping rgb values is to trade red-green to blue-yellow, all the things I would have been able to see now suffer from the original problem. While putting letters over the objects would allow them to be distinguished somewhat easier, I imagine the sheer number of things would just create a blur of information.

Also, Most epileptics are also not photosensitive (as opposed to common belief), and its almost unheard of past puberty.

I agree that yes it would stop you seeing things that you could currently see but my suggestion was the ability to pick and choose your colour mode on the fly so if you're looking for X and it's best identifiable in one mode you can swap to that colour mode with a shortcut and then swap to another.

As for the epilepsy thing I know it is the uncommon form but I have photoepileptic (PSE) friends so while uncommon something I'm always thinking about when I want to share cool movies with them. Hell I'd use it on some movies (the power rangers 2017 for example) cause persistent flashing gives me headaches even if I don't get seizures.

jzr wrote:I don't actually have any experience in color correction for color blindness, but here's an idea that should be fairly easy to implement and generic...

So, basically, how you transform a color depends mostly on hue, right?
Let's say we represent every pixel as HSV values. Then you may define three Lua functions, one maps (hue, saturation) pair to new saturation, second maps (hue, brightness) pair to new brightness, and third just maps hue to new hue.
Make those three functions user-defined, and precompute each as a lookup table (for 8b components, that's 64kB+64kB+256B).
Then, apply those mappings on the entire screen as a pixel shader, and let users and modders worry about particular color mappings for particular disorders, without changing any graphics at all!

Does that sound too crazy?

On further thought, it does sound crazy.
Since you'd need a precomputed table in any case (can't reasonably call Lua functions for each pixel, that would grind things to a halt; not to mention that the conversions are based on empirical data, so there are probably gonna be tables anyway), it would make sense to cut out the middleman and just provide Factorio with the precomputed tables. So, same three tables, but directly loaded from a file, possibly an entire "colormaps" folder with the best of community suggestions, selectable via in-game settings.