CCP brings color-blind support to EVE Online

EVE Online developer CCP Games has brought color-blind support to its vast, massively multiplayer online offering.

The announcement was made on the EVE Community forums earlier this year, but after a bit of tweaking the feature is being rolled out in beta form. 

When it came to tackling the issue, CCP began by identifying the three most common forms of color-blindness: Deuteranopia (red/green), protanopia (another form of red/green), and tritanopia (blue/yellow). 

Initially, the plan was to add a support mode for each of those conditions, but after chatting to the handful of colorblind devs at the CCP office in Reykjavik, it became apparent that treating the issue in such a clear cut way wouldn't work. 

"As a result of our testing, we ended up with two preset modes and one custom mode that allows you to toggle any of the six main hues to be included in a resulting color palette," explains the dev blog. 

"Some games that offer color blind modes simply replace all color on the screen using the selected color blind hue mapping, but as it seems people don’t really care too much for that approach since it makes the game world look weird for no good reason as it’s only color used for indication of state that causes problems.

"Instead, we only apply the color-blind hue mapping to UI highlight colors, meaning that it’s mostly icons and text that get affected and not background color, the 3d scene, or graphical images like items."

There are still a few creases that need ironing out, as right now the mode doesn't work properly in certain UI areas, but overall the feature is working as intended. 

Those on the Singularity test server can take it for a spin by heading to the 'General Settings' menu, hitting the 'Color Blind Mode' option, and playing around with the settings.