GASPilot 0.2

GASPilot is a free tool designed to test and demonstrate techniques to make games more accessible as they are developed and placed into the Game Accessibility Suite. GASPilot is at the very early stages of development, but already provides two primary features:

Speed control within many modern video games.
Software adaptation of the QuadController XBox/360 to be used in FPS-style games.

The latest version of GASPilot and its source are available on SourceForge.net.

Basic Use

When GASPilot 0.2 starts, it scans for attached game controllers. It will initialize the first one found and begin mapping it as a QuadControl device for FPS. You may disable the controller mapping by going to the configuration page and disabling the controller switch. The controller mapping is not yet configurable (although it soon will be!). It is currently set up specifically for use in FPS games like DOOM 3 and Half-Life 2 with their default key bindings (and WITHOUT the joystick enabled!).

When a game is started through GASPilot, an intercept DLL (GASPilotDLL.dll) is injected into the target video game's process. This DLL provides an onscreen overlay for OpenGL and DirectX9 games and handles the game speed manipulation for GASPilot. Currently, the PageUp and PageDown keys are used to move the speed up and down. The F13 and F14 keys may also be used to force the speed to low/full settings respectively. Alternate configurations and mappings are not yet supported.

GASPilot Main Window

The first three icons in the Main Window are games that may be started. This will eventually become an easily configurable toolbar - right now the games can be configured in the ./Skin/skin.xml skinning file for the application if you want. If the games set in the skin are not present, then their icons will not be displayed and the buttons will simply be grayed out.

To start a game that's not in the toolbar, press the Disk

icon. It will open a file dialog - simply select the game's executable and press open. GASPilot will start the game and inject its intercept DLL into it.

To inject the intercept DLL into a running game, press the Needle

icon. It will present the Injection Window shown below - just pick the icon for the game and the GASPilot intercept DLL will be injected into it. You should then be able to control the game's speed.

To configure GASPilot, press the Gears

icon.

For help, press the Question mark

icon.

GASPilot DLL Injection Interface

The DLL injection interface just pulls up the icons of currently running applications and allows you to pick which you wish to inject the intercept DLL into (e.g. what game you want to control the speed of!). Please excuse the mess - this is a prototype :) It will scrolly soon to give you more apps.

GASPilot Configuration Interface

Currently, the only really working control on the configuration page is the Joystick. .
It allows you to toggle the joystick controller mapping on and off.

The rest of the icons, however, serve as a good roadmap for the set of features we're working on implementing for future versions

- Speed control is roughly implemented, but it is not currently configurable and is always enabled.
- One of the primary features under development is the external Closed-Captioning of games including a spatial audio radar based on the design of Reid Kimball and the Games[CC] group.
- A Scanning Switch overlay for DirectX and OpenGL games is planned.
- The scanning switch overlay and other game features may benefit from TTS feedback.
- This feature will provide the simulation of different forms of color blindness in video games for testing, as well as enabling the compression/shifting of huespace to increase contrast in otherwise indistinguishable colors in games for colorblind gamers. This is based off the concepts (and code) used by an old program called CodeBlind, but will be adapted to DirectX and OpenGL games
- Speech control and the embedding of Microsoft Active Accessibility in games could overcome quite a few difficulties disabled gamers have with complex interfaces. The plan is to embed IAccessible and speech command interception within the games via the intercept DLL.

In-game interface

Currently, there's just a basic bar shown in the top-left corner of OpenGL and DirectX9 games when GASPilot and its speed control features are active for the game. Control it using PageUp, PageDown, F13, and F14.