I suffer from relatively strong Deuteranomaly, which means I have difficulties differentiating between red, green and several other mixed colors. So as you can imagine I was delighted to finally see something in the graphics options for me. Sadly, the filter is actually making it worse than just trying to figure the colors out the original way. I asked some "normal" friends what differences they see and the general consensus among them was "it makes the game darker/duller", almost as if it is trying to imitate color deficiencies, instead of counter acting them.
Original
Deuteranopia Filter
I have seen it in quite a few games now, that a color blind mode just changes the entire color pallet, which is generally the completely wrong way to go about it. It is not everything that needs to change, but certain items just need
a. higher contrast or
b. other things by which to see differences, like a slightly different sprite (e.g. red circuits being turned by 30° compared to the greens)
I understand of course, that the latter may be difficult to implement, with how the game is designed to be moddable.
As an example, the first game I ever played, that did a perfect job with this, was Call of Duty Black Ops (2010). The general color pallet didn't change, but instead of red for enemies and green for friendlies, other player names were orange and cyan.
The items in factorio I am struggling with the most, as seen in the screenshot above, are the following:
- Red Circuits - Green Circuits (difficult in default mode, considerably worse with the Deuteranopia filter)
- Red Science - Green Science (this is ok in the default filter, but impossible for me in the Deutan filter)
- Green Science - Yellow Science (this is actually better with the Deutan filter, but almost impossible with the default)
- Blue Science - Purple Science
- Productivity Modules - Efficiency Modules
- Inserters - Stack inserters (only in inventory, when placed they look different enough due to the stack inserter's bigger "hands")
- Fast Inserters - Filter Inserters
- Active Provider Chests - Requester Chests
- Heavy Oil - Light Oil - Lubricant
There might be more items like this, but I think these should be most of them.
I think people with Protanopia and Tritanopia would have similar problems with a general color filter, but those cases are a lot rarer and I obviously don't know which items are the problematic ones for them.
In case of any questions feel free to ask:)
