Sound Cues for Hard of Hearing and deaf players: A Suggestion for Visual audio direction cues.

[daza 36]

With the new expansion right around the corner with Tanoa being mostly jungle hearing will become more important than before. 

 

I am hard of hearing and im completely deaf in my right ear. This means i can only use one ear phone in my left ear. So many times in the past when playing Arma and MP i have been unable to tell which direction arms fire is coming from, more so at a distance or in the instance of being in a forest even closer sounds can be confusing because you need two ears to tell if a sound is coming from your right or left and so as you can imagine with only one ear it is hard to tell direction of sound. 

 

So this is a suggestion for BIS to maybe add in a simple method of visually cuing the player direction of sound based on a radius around the player. For a long time we have had visual cues for our peripheral vision in game red dots for enemy and green for friendlies, so why not something similar for sound too? So perhaps instead of tiny dots we have tiny icons depicting explosion and another for gun fire in a general direction would be better? this would be by default turned off. And only players who want this feature can activate it. The very center top and center bottom could be for sounds directly ahead and behind. Arms fire over-riding sounds of movement if in the same direction.

 

Examples: Say you have a small white square icon of a single bullet appear on the top of screen when a single shot is heard, a sniper rifle. Then suddenly a four bullet icon appears/slides in next to it depicting automatic fire (the single bullet icon) fades out. To the right four single bullet icons appear (two at a time) with slight intervals depicting someone shooting rapid single shots, which you can hear also, and now know that is coming from your right on the left might be automatic fire icons, ok that automatic fire i hear is coming from my left or 10'O Clock. So now you can match what you hear to the visual cues. In a intense firefight this might get hectic visually, but you might be able to set translucency for these icons in the settings. So long as the icons appear instantly when the shot is fired/heard and which direction then that is all that is needed. If there is arms fire coming in all directions then it would be still useful to know which general direction just as a hearing person would know. Alternative idea would be a circle HUD that has these small icons on it, that actually might be easier to see, just dart your eyes left to it and then look in that direction. 

 

It would have to be for sound that most players would automatically pick up themselves, gun fire and perhaps if close by sounds of running feet (close by), players speaking on direction voice chat or whatever. For players who rely upon their eye sight a lot this wouldn't be hard to get used to. 

 

This would also benefit players who might be playing a game in a noisy house or whatnot. There are a huge number of people with hearing problems as well as completely deaf gamers in the world of gaming (I don't know how many here in the Arma community are hard of hearing like myself - perhaps comment in this thread if you are and would like to see a system implemented).

 

MP is an area we feel most affected because if you are playing with others in a group you don't want to let them down by not being able to tell which direction the enemy is attacking from which is often out of sight or from behind. Ai is fairly predictable but not human opponents, more likely to be flanked. Wasting precious seconds trying to find direction of fire often gets you killed.  And i think it will be worse in a jungle where hearing will become more important. I enjoy playing Arma more in MP than SP.

 

I am not a programmer so i don't know how easy or hard it would be to implement this request. But if Ai have a hearing system, then couldn't that be used for a trigger radius around player that uses that system and feeds visual cues to the player with the system activated. Maybe if there is enough interest someone could make a mod for this if doable as a mod- however the downside with a mod is most MP Hosted missions or servers only accept mods they allow. So having an official BIS system added to the core of the game would be better and open up all MP experience for deaf and HOH Arma players on a more even field sound wise. 

Adding a system like this in, could very well draw in deaf and hard of hearing players who may have shied away from MP, MP is where the fun is not just playing against human opponents but working together with others in a squad, which I played a bit of on an European server that had large battles each month a few years back, and i found my hearing situation made it harder to play in a team. But the upswing is in a team, you can see by their reactions which way the enemy is firing from if they are hard to spot.

 

Sorry for the wall of text lol. Hopefully someone on the BIS team might read this and consider the idea. 

 

Cheers!

[MrCopyright 107]

A far easier system, which can be community made with ease, is to simply have the very edges of the screen have some form of visual prompt for the direction of gunfire. Because you are only partially impaired, you will be able to distinguish single shots and automatic gunfire yourself, thus removing the need for icons. The transparency of the visual prompt can also vary depending on the distance as well. So if gunfire erupted nearby to the right of your player model, the right border of your screen would have a strong white strobe - much like the hit indication system as seen in games like Call of Duty. A distant shot would obviously yield a faint strobe. This is merely a suggestion and would of course require the MP server to host this feature. I haven't contemplated impaired players before - thanks for the insightful perspective. 

[daza 36]

A far easier system, which can be community made with ease, is to simply have the very edges of the screen have some form of visual prompt for the direction of gunfire. Because you are only partially impaired, you will be able to distinguish single shots and automatic gunfire yourself, thus removing the need for icons. The transparency of the visual prompt can also vary depending on the distance as well. So if gunfire erupted nearby to the right of your player model, the right border of your screen would have a strong white strobe - much like the hit indication system as seen in games like Call of Duty. A distant shot would obviously yield a faint strobe. This is merely a suggestion and would of course require the MP server to host this feature. I haven't contemplated impaired players before - thanks for the insightful perspective. 

 

Thanks for your reply. You have some good ideas. It's beyond my scripting skill to create something like that. I guess there would have to be a demand from hearing challenged Arma players to warrant one being made and someone taking up the challenge of making it and maybe BIS incorporating it as an optional setting (like the compass mod the one where you can see where your men are relative to you.

 

Some shooter games have a red arc on the left or right of screen when taking fire/being hit, that's helpful too.  Such a system as described in this thread could be also used in a SP mission as a gameplay mechanic where maybe PC has survived an explosion and is temporarily deaf, having to rely upon the visual cues when coming into contact. He might need to get back to FOB to hand over some intel during a battle where there are fights everywhere. Don't know if its possible in-game to change/over-ride audio settings to make sound mono or left or right side audio only (unless as an easier option just suggest to the player at the start to manually alter audio settings for full effect of immersion etc).