As detailed on the home page, development is now being carried out by the community; this page is being preserved for posterity.
Our aim is to provide access to the mainstream gaming community not by producing specialist "accessible games" but by making mainstream games—and their associated extension and development tools—accessible. We want blind people to not only play the games that sighted people do, but to be involved in the online communities that surround them and to extend them, creating new games and applications with them; something that sighted people have enjoyed a great deal over the years.
We are an Open Source project and believe in allowing everyone access to use and contribute to our software. We have always sought to engage with the community and allow them access to all areas of development.
The project was started in May 2003 by Matthew Tylee Atkinson and Sabahattin Gucukoglu. From 2003 to 2007, we developed an accessible version of Quake and QuakeWorld ("AudioQuake") which allows both single and multiplayer games, including the collection of online player statistics. This was the first adaptation of an existing mainstream first-person shooter for the sighted that is accessible to blind people and one of the first multiplayer accessible action games.
A number of community members have produced extensions and modifications to AudioQuake (such as JediQuake). We provide extensive documentation on how to do this and hope that other modifications, total conversion and even adaptations of newer game engines, based on the techniques developed for and used by AudioQuake will be created in future.
We'd love to see other important technologies incorporated into AudioQuake and new accessible games by the community. Immersive 3D audio would be an admirable goal for this and future accessible mainstream game engines, as well as making the games playable by those with disabilities other than vision impairments.
Currently we're working on handing over development to the community, by making use of Canonical's excellent Launchpad service, whilst we work on other projects and experiment with accessible map editing.
As of spring 2008, a prototype level description system has been developed; more information is available at the LDL page.
The Stats and Servers system is designed to allow you to find games and track your progress (frags, efficiency, rankings) over time. To make full use of the system you need to register a player name then you can look for active games and later track your progress (see the main Stats and Servers site for more info).
The AGRIP project has enjoyed a very supportive and active community, formed mainly—at least at one time—by a subset of the subscribers of the Audyssey (formerly "Blindgamers") group. This section explains how to get the most out of AudioQuake, both in terms of playing and developing it (though more on that later) and the community—from the Stats and Servers service to actually engaging in discussion with other community members.
Extensive documentation has been created on how to play the game, administer servers and develop mods or even totally new games based on AudioQuake. This can be accessed via the the documentation site (and there is more on development below).
Should you not find the answers to your questions in the documentation, or if you want to provide feedback or engage in a discussion with other community members, you can use the mailing lists. An announcements-only list and a full-on discussion list are provided and can be subscribed to on the mailing list site.
It is vital that if you find a problem with AudioQuake or the Stats and Servers infrastructure, you report it to the development team. This is the only way we can find out about problems and the only way to give us a chance of fixing them. If you report a problem, please provide as much detail (even if you think it's obvious) as you can, including but not necessarily limited to the following.
If you have all of these details, please file the bug under the appropriate AGRIP subproject on Launchpad. If it's more of a feature suggestion, please file it as a blueprint on Launchpad. If you're not sure if it's a problem or are just looking for general advice, please make use of the documentation or discussion mailing list.
As part of the bug-reporting process you will need to provide your name and email address to Launchpad (that really is it and it only takes about a minute in total) so that we can contact you should we require more information to help us track down the cause of the bug. Your diligence and support is greatly appreciated and the small amount of time you invest will result in an improvement for all users of our software.
Without ongoing development a project can't fix bugs or add new features. The group in charge of developing AudioQuake and Stats and Servers is the AGRIP Hackers on Launchpad. They're responsible for fixing bugs, adding new features and making releases and are always on the lookout for new members. If you're interested in doing some development, you can join them or just work on development on your own, based on the information provided by our documentation—though it's a very good idea to announce your intention on the mailing list first).