I use Productivity Power Tools and that is it. For those with many installed how has performance been? I've heard people complain that after installing "lots" that it became unusably slow. It has not been clear what is lots and if it is just one bad apple in the bunch causing a stink.

You need to include Window.h in Game.cpp. The forward declaration is just a place holder until the real class gets created. As it is right now Game.cpp never gets Window.h and so the class never gets filled out with the goods.

As a side note you could make your life easier and use the namespace in Game.cpp (using namespace numbro;) so you don't need to fully qualify it everywhere, unless there is an explicit need for it.

I wasn't aware of the #error preprocessor directive. Good to know!

I would also add for emphasis Average's suggestion of using forward declarations in this case as it makes more sense than annoying circular header dependency.

[s]

Has the code you posted been trimmed down? I am able to build it fine in VS2010 commenting out the includes I do not have so I suspect maybe a line that has been omitted is the root cause?


If not some other things to consider..

Have you tried adding the numbro namespace to the Game.h instances of Window? (numbro::Window). You should not need to, but if adding an empty class fixes it perhaps the namespace is not resolving correctly, or another class named Window exist somewhere.

Also, assuming you are running on Windows the official windows header is windows.h so as far as I know you should be okay, but Window.h is fairly likely to collide with something along the way. Just something to consider. If you rename it to something like BobSaget.h and rename the class likewise does it start to work?

Agreed! Very excellent write up, Rob. I have not had a chance to dig into all your references, but I would like to read up on them. In particular what you say about the range and variety of difficulty is very interesting. It is so common to see just a simple difficulty slider with no clear understand of what exactly it is doing. Being able to clearly enable or disabled features, and various ways to play is a very nice change.

Turn difficulty into a tab in the game settings rather than just a slider.

Edit:
Oops! Thanks for clarifying, Rob.

sony is apparently being sued for not making the games available for the visual impaired

I'll admit that the lawsuit is what started my curiosity on the topic, however I did not include it as I was afraid it would derail the topic. My opinion on the subject is that it is unfortunate that Sony does not take it more serious, however I don't agree that a lawsuit is the correct course of action.

Theo
As the article mentions, a game that works heavily around sound would be the most obvious way to make games specifically for the blind. I think there is a lot more that can be done with sound than simply sound cues, however they are a very important aspect. A game that uses music theory as a basis for more complex sound interaction, for example, can have all sorts of interesting ideas come out of it.

The article also mentions that one of the biggest obstacles they have to overcome is navigating menus, which is an easy thing to fix as developers. When a menu item is selected a vocal prompt could be made of what the menu item says/is. And for the rest of us an option to turn it off, naturally, but having it enabled by default.

I imagine friends and family help, as well.

[Contrast]

I came across an article about blind gaming that I found fascinating. Game making is a complex beast and making them accessible for all sorts of disabilities is not a simple, and in some cases, not a possible task, but it is a little disheartening that it is not considered more often by the large developers.

I thought it would be nice if our community, as another one of the things that distinguishes us from the mainstream, take it upon ourselves to challenge our designs and the way we create a game experience to open more experiences for people with disabilities.

To be clear I do not think it should be a requirement that games must cater to everyone under any circumstance, but just raising our consciousness to be more aware as we are building our games.

Besides simply bringing the topic up I am also curious what ideas people have to make already established genres more accessible, as well as ideas for these newer genres such as sound games which do not require vision to play?

After giving it some more thought I have decided to compile a list of commonly overlooked but simple fixes to make games more accessible. I will update it as I come across more examples or as people suggest more things. Barrie Ellis also has an excellent write up well worth reading.

This is not the end all list that a game must support, rather a quick reference that can be used to see if you are overlooking something in your game that can be easily fixed.

• Contrast Make the important elements of the game clear by considering color contrast.
• Controls This might be the most difficult as controls are so important and have become increasingly complex. Games can have simple control schemes while still be challenging. Examples include dewitters' Mystic Mine, and AdamAtomic's CANABALT.
• Feedback Consider multiple ways you can give feedback to the player. Mario is famous for visual, audio, and physical feedback (in the case of newer games). Some consider all of this feedback annoying if not required so consider ways to disable it. Mario is also famous for not allowing this.
• Menu Navigation Make the menus so that vision is not the only way to navigate. Quick solutions include text-to-voice integration to read out the menu items for the situations where an OCR type application would have difficulty reading your font. A more creative solution could be something such as using a voice acted narrator who walks you through the menus. Make sure not to get carried away and completely remove the text from the menus for the hearing impaired.
• Speed Ways to adjust the game speed. This can have multiple benefits beyond making the game more accessible. You can also integrate it into the difficulty of the game for new players who are having difficulty. You can also integrate it into your pacing. If you do these things be careful not to snatch away what the player has requested and bump the speed up too far out of their reach.
• Subtitles Don't forget them!

Source Control doesn't complicate things all that much. After enabling that option:

• Starting with a blank editor, project open with no tabs, open any old file and make a meaningless change to the file (checking it out first if applicable) such as hitting space or adding an empty comment - editing the file.
• Open any other random file while the edited file is the active tab which will give you two tabs.
• Go back to the edited file tab and repeat the previous step opening different files until you have as many tabs as you like (I like 6 or so).
• Once you have as many tabs open as you like go back to the edited file and undo your check out. (This last step isn't really necessary unless trivial differences bother you in your version history. The better control systems will usually not even bother adding the file if only a space has been added anyway.)

Luckily VS will leave the tabs open next time you open the project so I find myself doing this only with new projects or the odd time I close a tab out of habit. Oddly enough the length of this explanation makes it seem much more complicated than it really is. Once you get it, doing the steps above takes all of 5 seconds to complete.

[every damn time I look at a new file.]

XCode is nicer in general, although the lack of tabbed source files still bites. Grar!

I like Xcode because it doesn't have tabs.

The tabs drive me nuts in VC++/Dev-C++/Code::Blocks because it seems like I only have two options:

No tabs at all.

Open a new tab every damn time I look at a new file.

What is it with IDEs doing this?  Do people actually want that?  Surely I'm not the only person that wants a tab when I ask for it, and only when I ask for it, just like a web browser.

Or have I just been overlooking that option for years?

Yeah, tabs could definitely be smarter. I generally have to clean up my tabs (just close everything and start again) every couple of hours or so But at least for me it's better having them than not.

Tools > Options > Environment > Documents > [X] Reuse current document window, if saved

At least in Visual Studio 2008. Not sure about other IDEs/versions. I would think a similar option is somewhere in the scary dark corners of the app settings. I will admit not having a new tab button is mildly annoying, but hitting space on the active document if it has not been edited to get a couple tabs open to play with is minor inconvenience.

It just all seems so silly, if you're gonna be doing all that why not just use C++ in the first place

Two most common reasons:

• Person calling the technical shots is stubborn and has way too much power. (Commonly surrounded by a bunch of underlings convinced he is a genius.)
• Dependency on old code/hardware that the people who call the shots on budgets refuse to pony up the cash to upgrade. (Despite probably losing tons of money keeping the old stuff running.)

The Steam Hardware Survey would be a good resource to compare against. It is a safe bet to say the data will not include grandmas or people who purchase their computer from Walmart, but they don't count anyway.

Hello. I am a person, much like yourselves. I also happen to enjoy games in video form. With all this we have in common I think we will get along swell. I enjoy moody, atmospheric games (i.e. Team Ico, Cactus Software, Nifflas' Games, etc), but that doesn't mean I won't dabble in the occasional space marine saga, point-and-click-click-click, or a random roll of the dice.

I've been teaching myself how to twiddle the 1's and 0's, and I am becoming more and more familiar with the peculiar world of pixel art. Combining these skills I might become responsible for a game or two of my own.

I do not have a site yet, and I do not have anything I would be comfortable with sharing. I hope this means we can still be friends?