So, I was bored a while back, and I was reading various shader tools for reasons I’m not quite clear on. While I was working on it, I also stumbled upon Daltonizing, the process through which images can be processed to improve visibility for the colorblind.

So, as an alpha, I present to you a Protanopia Simulator/Aide Tool.

Read the included readme before using. It”s based on the FXAA Injector, so it’ll work on any game that the FXAA injector worked with. If you’re curious about the math, check out sepia.h and postsharpen.h. I’ve hijacked these two files to do everything with.

Here’s a few galleries for comparison, in the order of Original, Protanope, and Corrected.

http://imgur.com/a/QhfS1#1

In this gallery, we can see that Mortal Kombat’s character selection really isn’t helped much. Reptile’s noticably darker than Scorpion, Liu Kang’s pants are blue, his headband’s MUCH more defined on the sprite, and Katana/Millena are noticably different in shade.

http://imgur.com/a/PJXAP#0

Nothing by Nintendo’s going to be strongly affected, because both them and Valve are absolutely fantastic about gaming accessibility. The definition of part of the ground’s more noticable, and Kirby’s bar is much brighter. I can imagine it’d get rather confusing to have such a dark health bar!

http://imgur.com/a/YTOwa#0

Nothing major’s changed here in SFxT. Colors are a bit brighter and slightly more washed out. This probably isn’t a game it’d help with.

Experiment and post anything drastic you find! If you’re a protanope, I’d like your input.

Thanks also to Riot Games for taking it seriously and being part of the reason this exists.

This is the image I’ve found that most strongly illustrates the benefits of Daltonization. The right pane is Daltonized, the middle pane’s simulated Protanopia. Check out Daltonize.org for more info.

The Most Stunning Examples

Portal‘s definitely a game to check out. Valve’s utterly fantastic about their color choices and absolutely nothing needs to be done to fix the game for people of any colorblind variation.

Bust a Move is a mixed bag. I feel like Daltonization isn’t a method that’ll help very much here. The SNES version’s probably the least troublesome one, as well. Check this out for an example of it being a serious problem.

XBMC is a media center that works flawlessly with the shader. This means you can watch videos while simulating protanopia, or while correcting it! The Youtube plugin’s currently broken but it should be fixed soon. Netflix/Hulu compatible.