competitive splatoon 2 without voicechat

[Splatoon_Josh]

Hello fellow inklings!

I am a Deaf splatoon 2 player and I play with a group of Deaf people. Clearly, when it comes to playing competitive splatoon 2, we are at disadvantage. I know that most of you uses voice chat and clearly there is no way we can use it. So, I am wondering if you guys have any ideas. It could be ANYTHING! We are willing to give it a try.

Thank you!

 

[MindWanderer]

Can you and your friends speak clearly enough for speech-to-text? It would involve glancing at a screen, but that could work.

Otherwise, but if you're really thinking outside the box, what comes to my mind is a hardware solution. An display (either a monitor or a simple array of LED lights) and a board with buttons that correspond to the callout positions connected to something like a Raspberry Pi. Press a button with your toe, light up the display on your teammates' screens. Complicated from a layperson's perspective but actually pretty easy as a would-be Maker's first project.

 

[LiX]

Well, it would come at a certain cost to set it up, but I think there are some decent Voice-to-text applications that could make what MindWanderer said worthwhile. You'd just have to jam another screen next to your TV screen so that all it takes is a quick glance to see what your teammates said. This is a safe bet for while you are respawning and I imagine it's possible to train it to a point where you can do it pretty safely while in battle.

And regarding MindWanderers very creative idea: If you get something like that up, you guys could make a simple list of colour codes where for example light blue would mean "flanker on the right side" and dark blue would mean "flanker on the left side". Green could mean "We wiped them, it's save to push" etc.

Also: Big respect to your team, mate. Don't let being deaf get in your way! Splat some squids!

 

[MindWanderer]

Speech-to-text wouldn't take much to set up, depending on what tech stuff you already own. Signal, for instance, has a button you can hold to start recording and release to send, and it supports group chat. Install it on a tablet so the button is nice and big so you can press it with your foot, connect it to a monitor via a micro-HDMI cable, Chromecast, etc., and wear a bluetooth headset so it'll record your voice despite being on the floor (I'm betting you don't own one, but you can get cheap ones since you don't care about sound quality).

As for the other option, rather than colored lights with a code you'd have to memorize, you could either just label the lights with actual words or use a monitor. If you really wanted to put some programming work into it, you could have it show the map, so that if someone pushes the "snipe," "zone," "plat" button or whatever, it actually shows it on the map. The tricky part, other than actually developing the thing, would be coming up with a concise enough list of terms that apply to all maps and that you could memorize their locations well enough to activate without using your hands.

 

[Ansible]

Mad respect to you and your lot! =D

Personally, about half or more of my team sessions (turf, league, salmon, private) are on silent running. Though not due to reasons even close to you and yours. However I have realized a few ideas that could help yall out. And if you're already doing it, keep on doing it!

The biggest thing is to always communicate. In and out of the game itself. Now, you don't have to be too personal, but at least get some idea of what each other is like and how you often play at least on your own. In fact, communication is so important without voice chat that it's probably the underlying theme of this post, always communicate. Whenever possible, communicate. Before a session begins, as you're beginning the session, before a match, after a match, during a breaktime, as a session is ending, after a session. Just communicate whatever, but especially feedback and ideas. Ask for advice, suggest on how someone can improve, and often some sort of accolades when they improved or pulled something off or did something awesome even if it seems unremarkable—like throwing ink at my feet when I'm stuck and can't escape (that always woos praise from me!).

And whenever possible, just play together. And against each other. >=) Do this not just in Private Battles but Turf War too. Over time you'll wind up learning how to keep tabs on one another, how each other plays, how to assist one another, and even how to counter each other—which in turn helps each of you improve, adapt, and anti-counter one another in a beautifully endless cycle of improvement.

Also, develop in-game cues, gestures, and tactics, such as spamming point sensors, using "This Way!" whenever a special is ready for a push, waiting for a partner to respawn when more than one of you has been splatted, long-range inking of areas for your short-range user to move ahead freely and conserve their own ammo, "Ouch" spamming to let warn everyone of a serious threat, and so on! Most of these and more at least one of you will figure out while others will just be made up over time, but none of this will make sense if you don't communicate so everyone knows that "me shooting you in the face is my way of telling you not to go that way."

While you're at it, make use of private battles for more than just fighting. Without all the immediate pressure you can use it to help develop in-game cues that everyone will recognize when they see it. You can learn and plan how to mobilize and maneuver on a map. You can plot and practice things like a Rainmaker run or brella blocking. And you can just goof off to unwind and have background to process past and future matches.

Whew, that's way too much rambling. But let us know how things go and bring back any experience to help the rest of us out too. =)

 

[The Salamander King]

Most maps in this game can be divided into Mid/zone, spawn, Snipe, left/right side, bats (a flanking path out of spawn on the right), and sneaky (a flanking path out of spawn on the left).

You'd have to use the "This Way!", "Booyah!" and "Ouch!" commands a lot though. This way when you want to push, Booyah when you want to retreat and defend, Ouch when you get taken out, etc.

I like the idea with the toes controlling callouts, but toes are clumsy and many people don't sit in a way where they would be open (example: I sit cross-legged). This got me thinking, what if you could press certain buttons on your controller to signal a callout? Like the paddles on the back of the new Xbox controllers, or the 2 open D-pad buttons? The left-stick click is never used either.

I know this would be difficult, expensive, and probably time-consuming, but I think it could solve a lot of the problems you're having.

 

[Splatoon_Josh]

Hello folks!

Thank you so much for replying. First of all, we can’t speak. We use sign language if that helps? I doubt it does haha. We have thought about coming up with signals while playing but it would require us to look off screen.

We have already discussed about LED light idea and we would love to try that. I’m surprised you guys thought of that too! How exactly would that work? How do I know who is calling? How would I know where in the map?

We are thinking about foot pedals or buttons on our controller. Help us out!

 

[Splatoon_Josh]

Speech-to-text wouldn't take much to set up, depending on what tech stuff you already own. Signal, for instance, has a button you can hold to start recording and release to send, and it supports group chat. Install it on a tablet so the button is nice and big so you can press it with your foot, connect it to a monitor via a micro-HDMI cable, Chromecast, etc., and wear a bluetooth headset so it'll record your voice despite being on the floor (I'm betting you don't own one, but you can get cheap ones since you don't care about sound quality).

As for the other option, rather than colored lights with a code you'd have to memorize, you could either just label the lights with actual words or use a monitor. If you really wanted to put some programming work into it, you could have it show the map, so that if someone pushes the "snipe," "zone," "plat" button or whatever, it actually shows it on the map. The tricky part, other than actually developing the thing, would be coming up with a concise enough list of terms that apply to all maps and that you could memorize their locations well enough to activate without using your hands.

I really like the map idea. The biggest question is HOW? Is this even allowed? :p We are willing to come up with something similar to this. We need to know how it would work?

 

[MindWanderer]

To clarify, I'm not much of a Maker myself. I know in general how things work and what they can be made to do, but I've never sat down and done it.

The general idea would be to connect the GPIO ports on something like a Raspberry Pi or Arduino to a hardware control of some sort. You'd then have a program that converted those GPIO inputs into something more conventional (a text string, for instance). Probably the easiest thing would be to have a private Discord server to send the output to. You could then either just read the Discord with your normal human eyes, or do basically what Twitch Plays Pokemon did and turn the text back into a program input based on who "said" what. Since it seems like this isn't something you've done before, I'd start with the former. But if you did want a visual representation, you could use any combination of colors, symbols, and/or text overlaid on the map

As for the hardware side, it all depends on how much money and effort you wanted to invest in it. The cheapest and easiest thing would be just buttons on a piece of wood that you press with your feet, but you could go all the way up to a 3D-printed "shell" you could snap over your Pro Controller--or perhaps more practically, an entire replacement Joy-Con Grip.

Or another thought, you could use an existing hardware solution of some sort--a USB DDR dance pad, for instance. That would reduce the problem to 100% programming, no custom hardware required.

Edit: Sorry, you ninja'ed me, let me clarify. That part of it is primarily programming. Let's take the simplest example, a DDR dance pad with Joy2Key to translate the button presses into keyboard strokes. You'd have a program that would take those strokes and send them over the internet--again, the easiest solution is to use something out of the box, like Discord. Then another program would read your Discord stream and use that as input for visualization. (I believe a Discord Bot can help with this, but I'm not familiar with those myself.) So then if, say, Dave presses the keys that correspond to "Charger in Sneaky," the one program would send "Charger in Sneaky" (or just "cs" or whatever) to Discord, and the second program would put a Charger icon on your picture of the map in Dave's color for a few seconds.

Not the easiest thing in the world, but not all that hard for a hobbyist programmer, and you did say you were considering anything.

 

[thundasi]

ok i get the looking off screen, what about a pip inlay to your Skype and either color code zones and hot button colors or symbols. skull and cross is snipe, red square is street, etc. basically about 5 to 10 images everyone in chat sees you would have your group awareness, it could only be your side snipe our theirs which would require a map check if needed or situation would be self explanatory like on a forward push snipe would mean the one in front of you. i'm gonna fiddle with this and see what i can do. please keep us informed going forward.

 

[Splatoon_Josh]

To clarify, I'm not much of a Maker myself. I know in general how things work and what they can be made to do, but I've never sat down and done it.

The general idea would be to connect the GPIO ports on something like a Raspberry Pi or Arduino to a hardware control of some sort. You'd then have a program that converted those GPIO inputs into something more conventional (a text string, for instance). Probably the easiest thing would be to have a private Discord server to send the output to. You could then either just read the Discord with your normal human eyes, or do basically what Twitch Plays Pokemon did and turn the text back into a program input based on who "said" what. Since it seems like this isn't something you've done before, I'd start with the former. But if you did want a visual representation, you could use any combination of colors, symbols, and/or text overlaid on the map

As for the hardware side, it all depends on how much money and effort you wanted to invest in it. The cheapest and easiest thing would be just buttons on a piece of wood that you press with your feet, but you could go all the way up to a 3D-printed "shell" you could snap over your Pro Controller--or perhaps more practically, an entire replacement Joy-Con Grip.

Or another thought, you could use an existing hardware solution of some sort--a USB DDR dance pad, for instance. That would reduce the problem to 100% programming, no custom hardware required.

Edit: Sorry, you ninja'ed me, let me clarify. That part of it is primarily programming. Let's take the simplest example, a DDR dance pad with Joy2Key to translate the button presses into keyboard strokes. You'd have a program that would take those strokes and send them over the internet--again, the easiest solution is to use something out of the box, like Discord. Then another program would read your Discord stream and use that as input for visualization. (I believe a Discord Bot can help with this, but I'm not familiar with those myself.) So then if, say, Dave presses the keys that correspond to "Charger in Sneaky," the one program would send "Charger in Sneaky" (or just "cs" or whatever) to Discord, and the second program would put a Charger icon on your picture of the map in Dave's color for a few seconds.

Not the easiest thing in the world, but not all that hard for a hobbyist programmer, and you did say you were considering anything.

Wow! Haha I will definitely share this with a friend of mine and see if he could do something!

I'll keep you guys updated. Thank you so much!

If there is any more ideas, please share away!