ASCII Portal In the Works 82
Rock, Paper, Shotgun points out a video showing Portal, redone with ASCII graphics. It's still in development, but appears to be quite far along. Its creator, Cymon, says on his website, "I have Windows XP, so all binaries will by default be for Windows. But I will also be including the source code with the distribution and am doing my best to write it cross-platform compatible, so it should compile in Linux and Mac. I've had successful builds done in Linux." He also talks in detail about his design plans and ideas.
Innovative (Score:5, Interesting)
I must admit that my first thought was why and that its gonna lost all the interest in ascii mode where it would just teleport from one place to other. However after seeing the video, it seems to be a lot more than that and has very neat portal like effects. I loved how it creates the landscape on the "empty" space instead of just teleporting, which makes it seem continuous.
In an indirect way this also showed me that current games aren't just about graphics and innovative gameplay would had been forgotten. Portal could had been done years ago the same way its done here. However it was new kind of game and had good and fitting graphics, so the usual thought that new games aren't innovative doesn't really cut.
I hope this gets converted to linux aswell so I can play it over ssh :)
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The graphics of the text Portal seem to be similar to games I played on my TI-83, I think the name was "Ultima", so if a 6MHz Z80 can do almost the same graphics, it is definitely something that could have been done a long time ago.
(The TI-83 was released in 1996, but I bet that something like text Portal could have been made for a 286 with power to spare)
Honestly, I like 2D games, since the emphasis is more on gameplay and less on pretty graphics.
I played enough text based MUDs back in the day that I like
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Re:Innovative (Score:5, Informative)
There are some modern games still being produced in ASCII, like Dwarf Fortress [wikipedia.org].
What people tend to forget is that using ASCII as game graphics, you can do a lot more in-depth gaming without having your game look like crap.
It's kinda like the difference between a book and a movie. Books tend to draw you in more because you get to use your imagination to fill in the scenery. This gives the power to a mediocre book to still be quite good. However, the current state of special effects in movies and CG means that if your movie uses technology from even a few years back, the movie looks like crap and will probably not be received well. And as with movies, the latest technology requires a lot of money and man-power.
And of course, ASCII gives you a lot more CPU power for AI and other neat things. And it doesn't have to exclude the use of the mouse, sound effects, music, mulitplayer and other niceties that we get in full 3D games.
Re:Innovative (Score:5, Insightful)
"What people tend to forget is that using ASCII as game graphics, you can do a lot more in-depth gaming without having your game look like crap."
The problem is that some people consider ASCII graphics to look like crap, just by their virtue of being ASCII.
That said, it gives you the power to work on the gameplay etc, and you can later on put actual graphical tiles in, if you wanted. So long as you make the logic "portable" enough, you could even go so far as to put the game into a 3D graphics engine, and it would play the same, but (obviously) be presented in 3D.
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But that actually kills gameplay.
There are more reason for ascii 2d than just being easy to create.
Ascii is also easy to recognize and player can easily "read" situation. It is sort of high-contrast graphics that is very hard to pull with graphical tiles. I tried tilesets for DF and stayed away from it ... it just made game look messy.
And, once you get from 2d, you loose overview. I have seens roguelikes turned to classic dungeons (you can not really do much more thanks to underlying blocky nature of those
Re:Innovative (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing is that, as opposed to graphics, text characters are symbols that have been explicitly designed (and evolved) to be easily distinguishable.
There are several roguelikes that give you the option of using ASCII or tiles (Nethack, Dwarf Fortress if you count that as a roguelike, Crawl, etc.) but tiles are mostly a choice for newbies who are scared of ASCII. An experienced player will always choose ASCII because it will give him a broader view of the situation. With ASCII, it is easy to have an 80x50 dungeon in full view, with every object perfectly distinguishable. To do that with tiles in most current screens, you would need 16x16 tiles and those tiles are just too small to look decent and distinguishable (see this one [nocookie.net], for example) while an ASCII char is perfectly distinguishable at even smaller sizes than that.
So roguelikes using tiles typically just let you see a smaller part of the dungeon, which is a disadvantage, and thus any experienced player who wants to play in the best way possible will choose ASCII.
So no, it's not just a matter of being easier to code or saving CPU time. For some kinds of games, ASCII is just better.
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You forgot to say get off my lawn. I play NetHack just fine with tile sets. I'd say that you're actually at the disadvantage with just ASCII as I have a better view of my inventory, recent messages, and dealing with a shopkeeper isn't an absolute pain in the butt. ASCII is fine for a quick game on NAO but most of the time I just want to play the game instead of being forced to deal with the limitations of ASCII. And I even use the simple built in tileset.
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An 80x50 window with 16x16 tiles takes up a quarter of my display. I normally run much bigger than that, and the tiles look pretty distinguishable to me - certainly more so than just using colours to distinguish goat from goblin and peasant from hammerdwarf.
If I need a bigger overview, d12 supports zooming; it's still usable at 8x8, but I rarely find myself wishing the standard display was that small.
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That many wands in a weapons shop? Must be a bones file.
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3D doesn't imply a first person perspective... at all.
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So use unicode ...
Or dynamically remap the fonts (like in PCTools 7x "graphics" text mode, or the CA-Clipper Toolkit).
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That wasn't my point. My point was that most people consider text representation to be:
1. Old & Busted
2. Ugly
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But if you do that, than it's no longer an "ASCII" game, it's something completely different.
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Dwarf Fortress is fucking retarded. A text based game that requires Windows or OSX, 512 MB of RAM, and an OpenGL video card. No Linux and no mobile device support
Linux version [bay12games.com]. And it works fine on my laptop, great way to wile away a 4 hour train journey.
What's the point?
Um, it's a fun game? What other point do you want?
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DF has a terrible interface, though. These days, there is no excuse for that, text or no.
At least dopewars was apprehensible.
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And that's why you're a console gamer now. You can go ahead and stare at the pretty shineys while killing hookers or whatever.
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There are some modern games still being produced in ASCII, like Dwarf Fortress [wikipedia.org].
What people tend to forget is that using ASCII as game graphics, you can do a lot more in-depth gaming without having your game look like crap.
The beauty of one graphic tileset in relationship to another is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, but I don't like having to cross-reference a game's objects with an out-of game table. For instance, how is it obvious that a D refers to a dragon, while a d refers to a dwarf? (or vice-versa, or maybe D is a dwarf while d is a baby dwarf, while a red D is an evil dragon, or whatever...).
Graphics aside, nothing turns me off more than a hideous interface. In Dwarf Fortress, at least, you have to memorize a
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In Dwarf Fortress, at least, you have to memorize an arcane system of key commands to navigate through a literal fortress of menus
The standard display lists those key commands in the side of the window. You likely will memorize at least some of them during use, but you certainly don't have to.
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The standard display lists those key commands in the side of the window. You likely will memorize at least some of them during use, but you certainly don't have to.
Right, but for some reason, I have to press the button associated with each menu (like B for Build, D for Designate, etc.), instead of using the arrow keys or a mouse cursor to navigate my way through them. When slapping down plots of farmland, I have to use C and Z (or some keys on the left side of the keyboard) to resize those plots, while a different set of keys (PgUp and PgDown, I think) are used for resizing fences and walls. Or maybe I have them reversed. The point is that I don't remember them becaus
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Toady would be the first to admit the interface sucks. Future developments are listed on the main site [bay12games.com]; note the sizable Interface Arc [bay12games.com]. e.g. Core52 is "INTERFACE OVERHAUL, (Future): A coherent interface, additional options and mouse support". It'll happen when it happens, probably once more of the underlying behaviour stabilizes.
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I dunno, a pixel is much smaller than a character, and with even normal 2D graphics you can show much more than 256 different things within the space of a block.
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Just be careful - remember what happened to Bambi.
What, this? [youtube.com]
Re:Innovative (Score:4, Insightful)
In an indirect way this also showed me that current games aren't just about graphics and innovative gameplay would had been forgotten. Portal could had been done years ago the same way its done here. However it was new kind of game and had good and fitting graphics, so the usual thought that new games aren't innovative doesn't really cut.
I'd argue that there are still innovative games around, but most are derivate crap. In that sense nothing has changed from the good ol' days of 8- and 16-bit. What has changed, however, is that games are now more locked into specific presentation formats: everything has to be 3D, and abstract graphics have just about died out. In some ways, this limits what can be done (some gameplay mechanics depend on 2D or fake-3D presentation). We've lost some of the richness of the early game landscape because of that, I think.
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I think this is just usual bullshit. Yes, in my young age there were *great* games. Settlers 2, Civ2, Megarace 2, Populous, Operation Flashpoint. They were great, but they wouldn't be on today's scale. Age goldens things and so on. However I do still enjoy playing them, because they were so large part of my younghood. If they were new titles and something I wouldn't know, I wouldn't really be impressed by them.
And there are great games that dont rape it for 3D graphics now a days too. Just recent games incl
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Just because we're used to greater graphics now doesn't mean the gameplay is shit and only great gameplay is in 2D ASCII games we're you have to have good imagination to go with things.
Yeah, I *totally* said that... (rolls eyes)
To avoid troll-mods, next time try responding to what I actually said.
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Sorry, I took some fast response early in the morning. I see what you mean now :)
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Uh... what's so innovative about swiping someone else's gameplay and name?
Oh, it's in 2D? It might be cross platform? Yeah, been done [wecreatestuff.com].
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If you've read it correctly, I actually meant that the original Portal was innovative. Its nice however that someone has transferred it to ascii.
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Most games that work with Sprite images work for ascii. As it is in essence a bunch of sprites that are pre-made. You may not see the guy running but that doesn't effect game play.
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The problem is, sprites can move around on a pixel basis, and even overlap. Characters can't do that, they can only move around in blocks, and when one's in front of another, how do you see the one behind?
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Well umm it depends on your output hardware.
If you are using ASCII Line Printers then you can. Behold the Arch Or with other printers you can change the spacing so the characters be moved a few pixels in different direction.
What a coincidence... (Score:2)
Not ASCII (Score:5, Insightful)
...anyone else remember ZZT? I do.
Re:Not ASCII (Score:5, Funny)
You ASCII stupid question, you get a stupid ANSI.
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I remember it, and got a copy of it and Super ZZT when they were being distributed for free.
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Liar. You love being the pedantic one.
Re:Not ASCII (Score:4, Interesting)
I can double nitpick your nitpick!
First, you're not being pedantic at all. The confusion about what "ASCII" means has caused no end of grief. Look at all the web pages that are full of "?" glyphs because people are confused about what characters they can safely use. And that's actually an improvement over they way things used to be. For a long time most web pages didn't even specify character set, and browsers were supposed to guess. One resulting glitch: Internet Explorer tended to assume that any page containing a right-curly-quote was in Japanese!
One reason I parted ways with Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders was their stubborn insistence that anything you can type on a U.S. PC keyboard is "ASCII" and therefore universally readable. They've since discovered their mistake, but are still sort of in denial about the consequences.
Other nitpick: strictly speaking, there's no such thing as an ANSI character set. It's not even sloppy usage, because when somebody says "ANSI character" it's less than obvious what they're talking about. Probably CP 1252 [wikipedia.org], or maybe CP 437 [wikipedia.org]. The Wikipedia article on CP 1242 claims that it's called "ANSI" because of confusion with Latin 1 [wikipedia.org], which supposedly started out as an ANSI spec. (CP 1242 and Latin 1 are the same except that the former uses some codes that the latter doesn't; and yes, that does cause problems.) That rates a big {Citation Needed} from me.
Ooh! One more nitpick! CP 437 is often referred to as "extended ASCII". Now, this game looks like it's running on a PC using CP 437 displayed on MS-DOS's "ANSI" terminal emulator. (So called because it implements ANSI X3.64.) So EVERYBODY'S RIGHT!!!!
I don't care how nerdy it is (Score:5, Insightful)
No problem (Score:2)
I can easily see playing this game in 1983. The game logic is simple enough, it makes you wonder why nobody thought of it back then.
I'm not sure if the apple II's would have the horsepower to pull of the "spins" though ;)
No problem! Written in 6502 assembler, I don't think it would have been that hard. You'd probably have to come up with a delay to make the spins slow enough.
It's just a question of coming up with a clever trick - I had a friend in high school who would have looked at the spin as a neat challenge and probably he would have had it coded and running over a weekend...
It would hav
outro (Score:3, Funny)
Speaking of Valve Source games conversions... (Score:5, Informative)
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You're an idiot! Congratulations!
P.S. no link should crash any browser, it's not the link's fault your browser sucks.
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I thought the same thing happened to me, too (FF3.0.11), but it just took a good 60 seconds to load, and froze the browser in the meantime. Perhaps you were just impatient?
Portal was never about the graphics anyway (Score:2, Insightful)
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The graphics of looking through the portal and seeing yourself was a huge plus to keeping people 'in' the game.
You can do this with any SDL game (Score:4, Interesting)
Just set your SDL_VIDEODRIVER to aalib (or better, caca, for colour). Ascii frozen bubble can be quite fun.
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or better, caca, for colour
As someone who's spanish native speaker let me tell you that "caca" in spanish means "shit", so i wonder what color gives to my graphics using that "caca" which you speak of...
Totaly Amusing and .... (Score:1)
Another non-3D version of Portal (Score:5, Informative)
Cool.
Until this project is finished, may I recommend Portal: The Flash Game [wecreatestuff.com] ?
So do you mean... (Score:4, Funny)
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...the cake is a li--ne drawing?
Actually, the cake is an 'i'.
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The cake, lie or not, would be a '%' in most of the roguelike games. :-)
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But if the cake is a lie, as soon as you try to interact with it, it'll turn into an 'm' and start attacking you.
Such advanced graphics techniques... for ASCII? (Score:3, Funny)
To get the portal effect, this guy must have used some sort of ray-casting techniques in 2D. Plus the landscape rotation likely requires a matrix operation or two and some fancy rasterization algorithms. That's so odd, that he's using such advanced graphics techniques for "just" ASCII text. Next thing you'll know he'll find a way to offload the work onto the GPU, making the first ASCII game that requires a GPU!
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See Rogue Basin [roguelikedevelopment.org] for tons of examples.
Stumble Upon (Score:1)