7 ms·

Chroma: Ubisoft's internal tool used to simulate color-blindness

231 points by gm678 1y ago

gjsman-1000 1y ago
They aren't using GitHub correctly, so they have the installer for Windows in-tree. https://github.com/ubisoft/Chroma/blob/main/Release/Chroma_setup.exe https://github.com/ubisoft/Chroma/blob/main/Release/Chroma_s...
- tgv 1y ago
  This might be to placate the "where's the .exe?" crowd. A release and a hint where to find the .exe might have been more appropriate, but I doubt they will use this repo for development: there is no sign of branches, tags or other contributors.
  - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y ago
    Or rather they probably just dumped the project to a fresh git repo since their internal tooling probably handles binblob diffing in VCS.
- tester756 1y ago
  You're too pedantic, there are valid reasons to do so
  - perching_aix 1y ago
    What would be those? Serious question, not picking a fight.
    - KennyBlanken 1y ago
      Free bandwidth and boosting the engagement stats for their account among game developers, many of whom have github accounts.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - onli 1y ago
      There is not really a big disadvantage, is there? It keeps the .exe around in all possible versions without additional effort, even if external build dependencies were to fall away etc. Sure, nothing proper releases can't mostly achieve as well. But also not something bad. It's a little bit like when projects include their dependencies instead of just listing them in a gemfile etc. Some hate that, but it can make things easier.
      - perching_aix 1y ago
        Size comes to mind, and of course the proverbial policy of not having any blobs in a source repository for security reasons.
    - adzm 1y ago
      I've done this when we had existing scripts that were run after cloning a specific git repo, that then needed an .exe for reasons, and just adding the exe to the repo was the easiest solution so we didn't have to change all the existing tooling and processes.
- paxys 1y ago
  They are using Git correctly.
w4rh4wk5 1y ago
Alternatively, one could just use this shader for post-processing in their engine: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XdtyzM https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XdtyzM
- cwillu 1y ago
  That's funny, the shader doesn't appear to be doing anything…
- BowBun 1y ago
  Second key feature listed in the repo: > Work on all games. No dependency on any specific game or engine. So your solution isn't an alternative here since it requires modifying the engine/game code.
  - c-hendricks 1y ago
    With something like Reshade shaders can be injected into any game without modifying any engine / game code. Would work much like this tool from Ubisoft.
    - BowBun 1y ago
      > can be injected into any game without modifying any engine / game code This sentence is an oxymoron... Once you inject code, you have modified the original code. That isn't always possible or desired. If you take 2 minutes to read the user guide of both softwares, the difference is obvious. Reshade requires you to select the game executable and inject tools into the executable. It is specifically built to be compatible with all the major graphics drivers. Chroma does not require you to point to the game and seems sit on top of the whole screen. I assume it just captures the screen and applies transformations to it at the surface level.
      - c-hendricks 1y ago
        > If you take 2 minutes to read the user guide of both softwares, the difference is obvious. > Reshade requires you to select the game executable and inject tools into the executable > Chroma does not require you to point to the game Did we read the same user guide? As per Chroma's: > Right-click on the Chroma window to get the menu list of all applications which are running on the PC. > Select the application which you want to capture from the menu list You're right the implementation is different. Reshade injects itself into a games rendering pipeline, while Chroma seems to read the screen (or a window, I can't really tell from the code) and create a window which shows a region of the screen with the shader applied. In both scenarios a QA person could work with a generated build of the game and apply colorblind shaders on top of it, without having to ask a dev to add 'colorblind testing mode'.
Thaxll 1y ago
Ubisoft is on the forefront for accessibility.
- wincy 1y ago
  The advantage of these large corporations is good stuff like this that a smaller company couldn’t afford. Like how Disney World is in bending over backward to be accessible for my daughter in a wheelchair. This sort of thing is an objective good. The problem with their games is in being such big tent trying to appeal to everyone (note I’m not talking about accessibility, which is a totally different axis), they feel too smoothed out and have very little interesting to say, and their games just aren’t that much fun. It reminds me of that article posted on HN the other day saying that often our weaknesses and strengths are two sides of the same coin.
  - gambiting 1y ago
    Ubisoft is a huge corporation(I used to work there) - there are projects which are money makers and which have to be smoothed out and appeal to the largest possible group of people, but there is still a crazy amount of creativity happening in various corners of the company. For every Assassin's Creed there are 10 projects being worked on out of which maybe 1 will actually come out - generally if you can pitch an idea within your studio there is a good chance you will get internal funding for 6-12 months to work on it with a small group of other people. Passing other milestones on the way to release is much harder, but this kind of "work on anything and see if it works" approach is very much encouraged. OddBallers and RollerChampions being probably some of the better examples lately, and Grow Home much earlier.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    With the popularity of indie games I wonder why publishers don’t just try and buy out hundreds of these small devs under their shop. And I’m not talking like how when ea buys dice and ruins dice. That is the whole problem. Total autonomy should be offered. The publisher should exist solely as a balancer of budgets: skim profit when sales happen to pay for shops when dev work before a sale is to be done. No different than say a city department paying into the general fund and other department supported by the general fund.
charcircuit 1y ago
This seems overly complex. Why require input passthrough? It seems simpler to make an OBS plugin that way you are able to reuse a lot of work that already exists for game capture and post processing.
- 6SixTy 1y ago
  I would assume that most of the code is the way it is because "helping users flag accessibility concerns in real-time" in the about implies that they are play testing games using Chroma on top. Using OBS for this would require insane bitrate and tight latency restraints that do not sound very achievable. Also, at no point does it look like they are actually recording anything. Just screenshots.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    I never mentioned recording or streaming. You can have OBS preview a scene with filters. Plenty of streamers have played games via an OBS preview.
maxnoe 1y ago
Not for gaming, but this was developed for checking plots: https://github.com/hdembinski/monolens https://github.com/hdembinski/monolens And works cross platform.
fidotron 1y ago
Does anyone have any insight into how tools for simulating color blindness would fit into workflows? For example, in this case presumably the QA team play in different modes and provide feedback about things which aren't going to work, but that is a very different universe than web or mobile app design.
- nemomarx 1y ago
  could you use it during user validation testing? see if they can distinguish buttons etc?
  - AlotOfReading 1y ago
    Most colorblind people are so-called "anamolous trichromats" who have 3 functioning color channels, but one or more has some kind of deficiency. Instead of being completely unable to distinguish UI elements, they might simply take longer at it, or more likely to spend 10 extra minutes hunting for the red key the boss dropped in the grass. That's more subtle to test.
    - bongodongobob 1y ago
      Yep, exactly. I know cardinals are red and they look obviously red to me. Hard as hell for me to spot one in a tree though, this was the first sign when I was a kid. "What do you mean you can't see it!?"
      - brookst 1y ago
        I still remember by my surprise somewhere around age 15 when I learned that other people could tell a dead tree from a live one just be color.
      - david-gpu 1y ago
        > I know cardinals are red and they look obviously red to me. Hard as hell for me to spot one in a tree though Does it mean that trees also look reddish to you? I don't understand how cardinals can look "obviously red" and still blend in with the foliage, which average people would consider "obviously green". My mental model for red-green color blindness is that most reds and most greens are hard to tell apart because they largely look like shades of yellow.
Pet_Ant 1y ago
I have used Chromatic Vision Simulator on my iPhone with a camera to check for colour-blind accessibility of board games. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chromatic-vision-simulator/id389310222 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chromatic-vision-simulator/id3... It's free. I'm unaffiliated, just a happy user in the past.
ano-ther 1y ago
Does anyone know a tool that assessed which type of colorblindness you have? The tool here seems great, but when I want to explain to people how I see colors, I don’t know which deficiency to choose.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- mpetroff 1y ago
  Figure 24 in Paul Tol's Notes is a reasonable thing to try: https://web.archive.org/web/20250201164619/https://personal.sron.nl/~pault/#sec:colour_blindness https://web.archive.org/web/20250201164619/https://personal.... However, to properly screen for color vision deficiencies requires calibrated spectra. Thus, even a color-calibrated monitor is insufficient, since color calibration assumes that the standard cone response functions are valid, which isn't the case for anomalous trichromats (which encompasses the most common types of colorblindness). This is why screening, such as with the HRR test, is done with plates printed with spectrally-calibrated inks in controlled lightning conditions (again with a known spectrum).
username256 1y ago
The shader code in Chroma looks to be a direct copy/paste from this old repo: https://github.com/Chman/ColorBlindr/blob/master/ColorBlindr/Shaders/ColorBlindr https://github.com/Chman/ColorBlindr/blob/master/ColorBlindr.... I don't see it being referenced anywhere but maybe I'm mistaken.
sph 1y ago
Stupid question for colour-blind gamers: why do accessibility options in games remove and mute colours to simulate colour blindness types? (i.e. protanopia, deuteranopia, etc.) I imagine if you can’t perceive some colours, you want hue shift or boost, not to actually remove colours so it looks like what you already are seeing. Feels a bit like muting all sounds to help one with auditory deficiencies. What am I missing here?
- PetitPrince 1y ago
  You're missing nothing, that's just a badly designed feature (hello Doom 2016). Or rather a badly named feature. To give the benefit of doubt: maybe it's a simulator that the dev used for testing that got left in production ?
  - sph 1y ago
    Yes I always felt those accessibility options are actually simulation options for non-colourblind people, and no one uses them. I’ve seen them in half a dozen games though, so it cannot be really a mistake.
    - stodor89 1y ago
      I know non-colorblind people who play League of Legends with colorblind settings turned on. Dunno what to make of that.
- MathMonkeyMan 1y ago
  Suppose you can distinguish 16 colors. Somebody else can distinguish only 4. To accommodate the sees-only-4-colors person, you need to make sure that game elements are not differentiated by colors that look the same to the sees-only-4-colors person. One way to do this is to choose a color palette having only 4 colors and designing the game to still make sense that way. Also make sure that sees-only-4-colors can distinguish the 4 colors you chose.
  - sph 1y ago

231 points by gm678 1y ago

They aren't using GitHub correctly, so they have the installer for Windows in-tree. https://github.com/ubisoft/Chroma/blob/main/Release/Chroma_setup.exe https://github.com/ubisoft/Chroma/blob/main/Release/Chroma_s...

tgv 1y ago
This might be to placate the "where's the .exe?" crowd. A release and a hint where to find the .exe might have been more appropriate, but I doubt they will use this repo for development: there is no sign of branches, tags or other contributors.
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y ago
  Or rather they probably just dumped the project to a fresh git repo since their internal tooling probably handles binblob diffing in VCS.
tester756 1y ago
You're too pedantic, there are valid reasons to do so
- perching_aix 1y ago
  What would be those? Serious question, not picking a fight.
  - KennyBlanken 1y ago
    Free bandwidth and boosting the engagement stats for their account among game developers, many of whom have github accounts.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - onli 1y ago
    There is not really a big disadvantage, is there? It keeps the .exe around in all possible versions without additional effort, even if external build dependencies were to fall away etc. Sure, nothing proper releases can't mostly achieve as well. But also not something bad. It's a little bit like when projects include their dependencies instead of just listing them in a gemfile etc. Some hate that, but it can make things easier.
    - perching_aix 1y ago
      Size comes to mind, and of course the proverbial policy of not having any blobs in a source repository for security reasons.
  - adzm 1y ago
    I've done this when we had existing scripts that were run after cloning a specific git repo, that then needed an .exe for reasons, and just adding the exe to the repo was the easiest solution so we didn't have to change all the existing tooling and processes.
paxys 1y ago
They are using Git correctly.

w4rh4wk5 1y ago

Alternatively, one could just use this shader for post-processing in their engine: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XdtyzM https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XdtyzM

cwillu 1y ago
That's funny, the shader doesn't appear to be doing anything…
BowBun 1y ago
Second key feature listed in the repo: > Work on all games. No dependency on any specific game or engine. So your solution isn't an alternative here since it requires modifying the engine/game code.
- c-hendricks 1y ago
  With something like Reshade shaders can be injected into any game without modifying any engine / game code. Would work much like this tool from Ubisoft.
  - BowBun 1y ago
    > can be injected into any game without modifying any engine / game code This sentence is an oxymoron... Once you inject code, you have modified the original code. That isn't always possible or desired. If you take 2 minutes to read the user guide of both softwares, the difference is obvious. Reshade requires you to select the game executable and inject tools into the executable. It is specifically built to be compatible with all the major graphics drivers. Chroma does not require you to point to the game and seems sit on top of the whole screen. I assume it just captures the screen and applies transformations to it at the surface level.
    - c-hendricks 1y ago
      > If you take 2 minutes to read the user guide of both softwares, the difference is obvious. > Reshade requires you to select the game executable and inject tools into the executable > Chroma does not require you to point to the game Did we read the same user guide? As per Chroma's: > Right-click on the Chroma window to get the menu list of all applications which are running on the PC. > Select the application which you want to capture from the menu list You're right the implementation is different. Reshade injects itself into a games rendering pipeline, while Chroma seems to read the screen (or a window, I can't really tell from the code) and create a window which shows a region of the screen with the shader applied. In both scenarios a QA person could work with a generated build of the game and apply colorblind shaders on top of it, without having to ask a dev to add 'colorblind testing mode'.

Thaxll 1y ago

Ubisoft is on the forefront for accessibility.

wincy 1y ago
The advantage of these large corporations is good stuff like this that a smaller company couldn’t afford. Like how Disney World is in bending over backward to be accessible for my daughter in a wheelchair. This sort of thing is an objective good. The problem with their games is in being such big tent trying to appeal to everyone (note I’m not talking about accessibility, which is a totally different axis), they feel too smoothed out and have very little interesting to say, and their games just aren’t that much fun. It reminds me of that article posted on HN the other day saying that often our weaknesses and strengths are two sides of the same coin.
- gambiting 1y ago
  Ubisoft is a huge corporation(I used to work there) - there are projects which are money makers and which have to be smoothed out and appeal to the largest possible group of people, but there is still a crazy amount of creativity happening in various corners of the company. For every Assassin's Creed there are 10 projects being worked on out of which maybe 1 will actually come out - generally if you can pitch an idea within your studio there is a good chance you will get internal funding for 6-12 months to work on it with a small group of other people. Passing other milestones on the way to release is much harder, but this kind of "work on anything and see if it works" approach is very much encouraged. OddBallers and RollerChampions being probably some of the better examples lately, and Grow Home much earlier.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  With the popularity of indie games I wonder why publishers don’t just try and buy out hundreds of these small devs under their shop. And I’m not talking like how when ea buys dice and ruins dice. That is the whole problem. Total autonomy should be offered. The publisher should exist solely as a balancer of budgets: skim profit when sales happen to pay for shops when dev work before a sale is to be done. No different than say a city department paying into the general fund and other department supported by the general fund.

charcircuit 1y ago

This seems overly complex. Why require input passthrough? It seems simpler to make an OBS plugin that way you are able to reuse a lot of work that already exists for game capture and post processing.

6SixTy 1y ago
I would assume that most of the code is the way it is because "helping users flag accessibility concerns in real-time" in the about implies that they are play testing games using Chroma on top. Using OBS for this would require insane bitrate and tight latency restraints that do not sound very achievable. Also, at no point does it look like they are actually recording anything. Just screenshots.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  I never mentioned recording or streaming. You can have OBS preview a scene with filters. Plenty of streamers have played games via an OBS preview.

maxnoe 1y ago

Not for gaming, but this was developed for checking plots: https://github.com/hdembinski/monolens https://github.com/hdembinski/monolens And works cross platform.

fidotron 1y ago

Does anyone have any insight into how tools for simulating color blindness would fit into workflows? For example, in this case presumably the QA team play in different modes and provide feedback about things which aren't going to work, but that is a very different universe than web or mobile app design.

nemomarx 1y ago
could you use it during user validation testing? see if they can distinguish buttons etc?
- AlotOfReading 1y ago
  Most colorblind people are so-called "anamolous trichromats" who have 3 functioning color channels, but one or more has some kind of deficiency. Instead of being completely unable to distinguish UI elements, they might simply take longer at it, or more likely to spend 10 extra minutes hunting for the red key the boss dropped in the grass. That's more subtle to test.
  - bongodongobob 1y ago
    Yep, exactly. I know cardinals are red and they look obviously red to me. Hard as hell for me to spot one in a tree though, this was the first sign when I was a kid. "What do you mean you can't see it!?"
    - brookst 1y ago
      I still remember by my surprise somewhere around age 15 when I learned that other people could tell a dead tree from a live one just be color.
    - david-gpu 1y ago
      > I know cardinals are red and they look obviously red to me. Hard as hell for me to spot one in a tree though Does it mean that trees also look reddish to you? I don't understand how cardinals can look "obviously red" and still blend in with the foliage, which average people would consider "obviously green". My mental model for red-green color blindness is that most reds and most greens are hard to tell apart because they largely look like shades of yellow.

Pet_Ant 1y ago

I have used Chromatic Vision Simulator on my iPhone with a camera to check for colour-blind accessibility of board games. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chromatic-vision-simulator/id389310222 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chromatic-vision-simulator/id3... It's free. I'm unaffiliated, just a happy user in the past.

ano-ther 1y ago

Does anyone know a tool that assessed which type of colorblindness you have? The tool here seems great, but when I want to explain to people how I see colors, I don’t know which deficiency to choose.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mpetroff 1y ago
Figure 24 in Paul Tol's Notes is a reasonable thing to try: https://web.archive.org/web/20250201164619/https://personal.sron.nl/~pault/#sec:colour_blindness https://web.archive.org/web/20250201164619/https://personal.... However, to properly screen for color vision deficiencies requires calibrated spectra. Thus, even a color-calibrated monitor is insufficient, since color calibration assumes that the standard cone response functions are valid, which isn't the case for anomalous trichromats (which encompasses the most common types of colorblindness). This is why screening, such as with the HRR test, is done with plates printed with spectrally-calibrated inks in controlled lightning conditions (again with a known spectrum).

username256 1y ago

The shader code in Chroma looks to be a direct copy/paste from this old repo: https://github.com/Chman/ColorBlindr/blob/master/ColorBlindr/Shaders/ColorBlindr https://github.com/Chman/ColorBlindr/blob/master/ColorBlindr.... I don't see it being referenced anywhere but maybe I'm mistaken.

sph 1y ago

Stupid question for colour-blind gamers: why do accessibility options in games remove and mute colours to simulate colour blindness types? (i.e. protanopia, deuteranopia, etc.) I imagine if you can’t perceive some colours, you want hue shift or boost, not to actually remove colours so it looks like what you already are seeing. Feels a bit like muting all sounds to help one with auditory deficiencies. What am I missing here?

PetitPrince 1y ago
You're missing nothing, that's just a badly designed feature (hello Doom 2016). Or rather a badly named feature. To give the benefit of doubt: maybe it's a simulator that the dev used for testing that got left in production ?
- sph 1y ago
  Yes I always felt those accessibility options are actually simulation options for non-colourblind people, and no one uses them. I’ve seen them in half a dozen games though, so it cannot be really a mistake.
  - stodor89 1y ago
    I know non-colorblind people who play League of Legends with colorblind settings turned on. Dunno what to make of that.
MathMonkeyMan 1y ago
Suppose you can distinguish 16 colors. Somebody else can distinguish only 4. To accommodate the sees-only-4-colors person, you need to make sure that game elements are not differentiated by colors that look the same to the sees-only-4-colors person. One way to do this is to choose a color palette having only 4 colors and designing the game to still make sense that way. Also make sure that sees-only-4-colors can distinguish the 4 colors you chose.
- sph 1y ago