Chroma: Ubisoft's internal tool used to simulate color-blindness
github.com231 points by gm678 24 days ago
231 points by gm678 24 days 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....
I don't see it being referenced anywhere but maybe I'm mistaken.
Not for gaming, but this was developed for checking plots: https://github.com/hdembinski/monolens
And works cross platform.
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/id3...
It's free. I'm unaffiliated, just a happy user in the past.
Ubisoft is on the forefront for accessibility.
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.
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.
Accessibility typically doesn't cost much. With many modern OS UI frameworks, you get it for free as long as you don't go out of your way to customize shit that you probably shouldn't be customizing in the first place. If you stick to standard controls and not try to use crazy ways to override user preferences, your application should be accessible to things like screen readers mostly out of the box.
As with most things, this is an issue of education and awareness. It's not that most developers intentionally break accessibility, but rather that a very large number of developers simply don't even know it's an issue, let alone something that they should keep in mind.
"customizing shit that you probably shouldn't be customizing" is kind of a standard in video games.
Video games are not meant do be productive, they are meant to be fun, and standardization is boring. It means that they can't completely rely on OS frameworks to make an appealing game, it means that accessibility needs first hand consideration.
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.
Publishers that want to work with indie studios are already accepting 100s of pitches and choose 0.1% they like. If a big publisher will buy a lot of small indie studios you'll soon see titles in a press like "{PUBLISHERNAME} force developers to live on ramen and work 12 / 6".
Simply because working on very tight budget likely 12/6 is how indie games are made. And to be honest in modern economy having any budget at all is kind a success already. So I'd belive most of small games are built on enthusiasm and founders own money.
Vast majority of "indie" games budgets are in range of $100,000 and $300,000 total. Over that amount there is gap where no one invest except few rich, successful and picky publishers. Getting more funding for a small-scale project is extremely hard so if your game needs more then it's must be AA project for at least $2,000,000+ budget. But AA+ means $40+ price tag, completely different production quality and large team so very few kind of games fit the math.
PS: I co-founder of a small gamedev studio and I know quite a few other people in this industry.
PSS: I'm happy to be wrong though. So if you know how to get game funded I have 4 cool playable prototypes to build into a game, team of 10+ devs and we track record for 3 released titles including one for consoles.
The short answer is that for a company like Ubisoft or EA, big blockbusters are much more reliable and more profitable than indie games. Not that smaller games can’t do amazingly well, but most don’t make a profit, and the risk doesn’t justify the expenditure for that kind of company.
Also, like another poster mentioned, there already exists a host of creativity in these AAA companies, that’s not the problem. The problem is making something that will reliably keep the company in the black.
> 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.
Because they don't have to. In most cases, to have a large successful game, developers need publishers. Publishers are who negotiate with Steam or Gog or EA. Publishers are who figure out in the in-game microtransaction economy. Publishers are who do all the promotional activities like getting famous streamers to play the game.
The gaming community never seems to understand this. Who they think of as "the devs" are often actually the publisher.
Its basically akin to the book industry then. Which again makes my question still stand. In books you have huge publishers yes but also some specifically catered to smaller market stuff like what an indie game dev shop might be like. They go on making their money without having to pull JK Rowling just having a smattering of these smaller authors and selling.
"I mean, Led Zeppelin didn't write tunes that everybody liked. They left that to the Bee Gees."
AAA is going to regress toward slop as the number of cooks in the kitchen increases, not just counting people who work directly on the game but investors, members of the ESG committee from the bank issuing loans to the studio, etc.
The next bellwether: Bungie's Marathon (2025). Marathon (1994) was a neat game that expanded upon "Doom-likes" as they were called with new engine features, multiplayer modes, and (gasp!) lore that you could unlock. It was specific. It had a vision. Marathon (2025) is a multiplayer-only, generic characters, generic settings, generic objectives. Basically Sony is turning Bungie into a dumping ground for devs on the failed Concord.
Glad they're open-sourcing it, since "Accessibility" falls under the umbrella of the dreaded "DEI", which means we can expect to see any government-funding for it dry up.
Luckily Ubisoft is (mostly) European so it should avoid the events in the US. I'm sure the the anti-progressives will eventually start making headway in Europe but so far the Continent at least seems to have stayed sane. I could be wrong about this but i don't think I've seen the slept agenda being pushed anywhere other than the U.K.
>Hungary passes constitutional amendment to ban LGBTQ+ gatherings
Just the first one that comes to mind.
The Hungarian government is insane. The Polish ones used to be as well but after the elections it is normal again. There is also Ireland with their abortion laws that are backwards.
Other than that we are sane, Hungary+Ireland is not that much
Ireland had abortion referendum 8 years ago. If you're going to call rant and call entire countries insane and backwards then at least get your basic facts straight.
I stand corrected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_Republic_of_Ir...
Abortion rights in Ireland are OK, I was living with old prejudices. The number of doctors that perform it is still low, but fair enough - I was all wrong.
(unfortunately I cannot update my comment)
Ireland legalised abortion by referendum a while back, FWIW.
I stand corrected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_Republic_of_Ir...
Abortion rights in Ireland are OK, I was living with old prejudices. The number of doctors that perform it is still low, but fair enough - I was all wrong.
(unfortunately I cannot update my comment)
(continental) Europe never really had much of a push in that direction, though.
The whole concept of DEI / woke is not much of a thing outside the English-speaking world. Very small parts of it (gender parities, a bit more transgender awareness, the "transgender athletes in sports" kerfuffle) have leaked through, but that's it. Where I live (Poland), most people, even well-educated people, haven't ever heard of the concept of specifying your pronouns.
> I've seen the slept agenda
"Slept" as the opposite of "woke", right? This is genius! Is something actually used by more people?
[flagged]
The Trump admin is literally withdrawing ADA guidance without replacement. And as part of his executive orders they consider accessibility as part of the whole phrase (DEIA) [1] and are working to gut any DEIA programs. So you're factually wrong.
[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/29/2025-01...
So, point out or quote the portion here that says wheelchair ramps and alt tags are no longer required.
Oh, that's right, you made that up.
Is that really the best argument you've got when faced with the government telling you exactly what they're doing? Like if you're trying to troll you're doing an extremely poor job at it and just making yourself look bad.
I asked you for a single quote. You can't produce one because you made this hysteria up.
Nobody is banning wheel chair ramps, and nobody is banning alt tags, color contrast and the like. You are literally just making this up.
Quite the fearmonger, you are.
The quotes are right there, in the executive order I linked you. You chose not to read it. It's in the plainest language possible. Again, not doing yourself any favors here.
I think you are correct that GP is evading your reference, and further I think they are over the line of trolling, but I do think you are mistaken in your reading (or at least, you are reading more into the document than it reads itself). For example:
> shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.
Their premise seems to be that programs (including performance reviews mentioned later in the document) which provide preferential or beneficial treatment to people based on DEIA characteristics are discriminatory and illegal under current laws, which prohibit discrimination on protected classes. I.e. you can't promote someone for being a man, or for being a woman, because sex is a protected class. If you create a program to help train/network people of a specific sex to the exclusion of the other sex, that violates the law (according to the argument being put forth here. IANAL so am not providing legal analysis, just doing my best to steel man their side here). The order you linked seems to be trying to stop this "illegal" practice in the US federal government. Note that the ADA is not illegal, in fact it is the law. Nothing in there is repealing the ADA or paring it back, at least that I read. I wouldn't be shocked if they are doing so through a different channel, but at a minimum the source you posted does not seem to validate your claims.
The claim I was refuting was that the government does not consider Accessibility under DEIA. That's it. And in the plain text of the executive order, they include it.
And please, reread the executive order. I can't believe I need to explain to two separate people what is said in the plainest, clearest language possible:
> (a) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), assisted by the Attorney General and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear
It says the termination of ALL discriminatory programs, including but not limited to 'illegal DEIA'. This is clear that they, by definition, consider DEIA as a whole discriminatory. And it takes all of five seconds to check how the admin has been behaving over the past few months to see that this is what they are doing.
That's good, but it's sad that it's the only good thing that can be said about them...
I'm pro-accessibility and have contributed privately to blind developer initiatives. Unfortunately Ubisoft insists on implement user-hostile accessibility that screams at the user using voice-to-text when they open their games and is quite difficult to get through even as an abled user.
How about Ubisoft work with Sony/Microsoft/Valve and get vision and hearing disability implemented at the device level rather than harassing abled users every new game which I'm sure through this frustration is contributing in some small way to these anti-intellectual movements against accessibility.
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?
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 ?
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.
I know non-colorblind people who play League of Legends with colorblind settings turned on. Dunno what to make of that.
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.
Is it though? This is the deuteranopia (red-green blindness) option in Destiny
https://www.gamersexperience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/...
The red and green icons are still prominently there. If one is red-green blind, shouldn’t those icons be any other hue than green and red?
They've moved them away from being pure red/green, but more importantly they made one lighter and the other darker. Everybody can detect lightness!
I believe the red-green blind means you can’t distinguish between different shades of red and green ., not that you can’t see red and green. So you’re safe as long as you’re not using multiple red and green shades
Boosting contrast won't help you if you can't tell the difference, so you actually want to shift colors away from the ambiguous axis. This necessarily has the effect of removing certain colors.
Not exactly. It’s not that I can’t see the colors, I just need more contrast to pick up red or green. A grayish green looks the same as plain gray to me. A small bright green dot? Might as well be gray or brown. But a large, solid area of bright green or red? No problem at all.
Same here. I can figure it out, just not at a glance. Unfortunately, when it comes to video games, identifying small flashing colors at a glance is exactly the goal.
You can also overlay hints, for example different shadow ditherings depending on color ? Im actually pro ambivalent colors as this is what feels natural for somebody color mismatching.
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.
could you use it during user validation testing? see if they can distinguish buttons etc?
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.
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!?"
> 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.
At least for me (I am red green colorblind), I have the mental model to help me know culturally what is "red" (an apple) and what is "green" (a pine tree) but I start having issues the moment red and green start appearing next to each other in which case they just look like muddy different shades if I squint very hard.
It is hard to explain because much of our modern signage and whatnot has been designed with colorblindness in mind; most "green" traffic lights, for example, are green-whitish specifically to address colorblindness. But not all of it; when I used to work in IT (as in literal computer diagnostics) it was pretty impossible for me to ascertain any particular diagnostic light.
Something similar here:
- Part of my colorblindness seems to be a language thing, especially as a non native speaker of English: is that status light "amber" or is it just on? (here it it obviously helps if there is a full rack and one of them sticks out)
- another part is about recognizing the colors of tiny dots (lanterns, specks on the floor). I can sometimes clearly see the same color if there is a cm^2 or a m^2 of it, no problem, but a tiny dot of the same color looks generic grey or generic yellow
- and another part, probably related to the first one, is just noticing: for example the mixed waste bins are (very dark) green but until my wife thought I joked I didn't notice. Now it is very obvious
- then there is the obviously actual color blind part: when a doctor hands me the color splatters with images I don't see every one of them and on some I see the wrong numbers
- another obvious clue there is something I actually cannot see: when I use colorblind simulation in digital image manipulation programs it feels like nothing happens
- bonus 1: my house is clearly (IMO) green, but sometimes this has other people including people with supposedly full color vision confused, which means either I see the green because it isn't drowned in another nuance that other people see or there is something even funnier going on with my color vision
- bonus 2: It feels like it is never pitch dark for me, as long as I am outdoors. (Caves, bunkers and technical rooms without lights can be though.)
Brains are complicated. Speaking about the more common deutan trichromancy (protan has a characteristic dimming of reds such that "same luminance" colors are visually different brightnesses), for me red and green are still separate and distinguishable parts of the spectrum, both again separate from the yellows and oranges. What happens is that red is not "visually obvious", in the sense that the sense that I register it subconsciously.
Here's an example photo I took in a tulip field with spots of emerging red flowers in a sea of green: https://i.imgur.com/44VRERI.jpeg
I can see the flowers if I look at them, but if I hold the picture in my peripheral vision away from my focal center, I don't register the spots of red in the back of the field.
What tends to happen with anamolous trichromats is that the brain compensates in a bunch of different ways. Lightness contrast sensitivity goes up, color contrast sensitivity goes up, and your brain "alters" the perceived colors closer to what a color normal person would perceive. The brain is mostly able to compensate for the reduced functionality to the point where you might not even know you're colorblind until you do color matching tests. This doesn't fix everything though, and this happens to be a common weakness for deutans.
I've done work that, for better or worse, required creating a color space.
It to enable dynamically generated UI palettes that also were numerically verifiable as accessible.
The way I model color blindness for a quick & cheap heuristic is, remove all hue-ness and saturation-ness. i.e. make the scene black and white.
That elides the exact compression in hue that is experienced by an actual individual (i.e. is it just red on green that's a problem? tetrachromate or x or y or z? at what severity (this is ~unmeasurable)) and leaves you with the raw problem, that there isn't sufficient contrast between the two colors.
Even though this elides information about the individual's exact experience, it is crucial for how to think about color, because even if color blindness didn't exist, it still would affect all of us
A cheap example of that is #FF0 text on a white background. Yellow is absurdly close to white (IIRC 97 L* versus 100 L*), so you can never quite focus on the yellow, it feels like its slippery and you get a headache trying to read.
(w/the tree x cardinal example, red is ~43? L*. A natural green w/o an absurd sunlight behind it would be somewhere around 55 L*. You want about 40 L* for good contrast, here we have ~10 L*, and once you lose the hue/saturation delta due to color blindness, it's quite difficult for the bird to "jump out", as it were. you could still find it scanning)
That's the suggestion I give to designers so don't take this as criticism, but monochromatic contrast isn't perfect either. Some forms of colorblindness actually experience a shift in luminance that depends on the color and their specific perception. Things that are distinguishable by contrasting brightness (e.g. black text on white background) may become ambiguous if those colors are changed to e.g. green and red respectively, even if the lightness contrast remains the same because they'll perceive the red as darker than it truly is.
This is specific to the person, so there's no real way fix for everyone beyond turning everything into extreme differences like pure black and white. It's just something to note about the limits of it as an accessibility technique.
Red gives me nightmares, ugh. I hacked up my personal version of our algo to only pair it with white
Well we aren't video cameras, there's all sorts of perceptual preprocessing that happens. I mean just look to the "what color is the dress" viral thing that happened. Vision is complicated.
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.
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.
Figure 24 in Paul Tol's Notes is a reasonable thing to try: 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).
Alternatively, one could just use this shader for post-processing in their engine: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XdtyzM
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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'.
But what does that give me? Why would I need to simulate color blindness in an already released title? In my opinion that's simply a developer tool.
What would've been more useful here would be a color blindness compensation filter, but IIRC there are already tools that can do just that for the whole screen.
Simple example: you want to develop a game and are looking for example implementations of specific mechanics or UI elements. You go through existing titles, and exclude those that use implementations that don't work well for colorblind people.
It's not hard to come up with more examples.
QA works off of builds, not a Unity project. So you could apply this tool on test builds of a game for QA to reveiw without having to ask dev to add 'colorblind testing mode'. That then means the QA team could instantly use this on all titles past and present without needing additional code. Seems like an obvious win.
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.
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.
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.
They aren't using GitHub correctly, so they have the installer for Windows in-tree.
https://github.com/ubisoft/Chroma/blob/main/Release/Chroma_s...
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.
Or rather they probably just dumped the project to a fresh git repo since their internal tooling probably handles binblob diffing in VCS.
You're too pedantic, there are valid reasons to do so
What would be those? Serious question, not picking a fight.
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.
Size comes to mind, and of course the proverbial policy of not having any blobs in a source repository for security reasons.
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.
Free bandwidth and boosting the engagement stats for their account among game developers, many of whom have github accounts.
