a few questions about ascii demos

[Shockwave]

Works fine and smooth here too Nino, great first ascii thing Next add plasmas, music, metaballs, raycaster and then enter the next tdmc! 

[benny!]

What shocky says.

[taj]

cheers taj,

that's strange that's one thing that should'nt happen i codded it to open the full 80*50 res. is it vista your on as i may be doing something that it doesn't like.

Actually just XP. Hmmm weird. I also noticed another ascii demo do this recently from northern dragons.
BTW is it legal in an ascii competition to open an ascii window and an opengl window (offscreen). Render to the hidden opengl window, capture the image and display in ascii window? I mean if you did it right, who would know anyway?

[va!n]

@taj:
afaik its not legal to use an invisble OGL / DX screen to render scenes, capture and displaying then on the console window. However you need to convert the captured image to ascii and display the ascii text/stuff on the console! I think its legal to render scene directly into an allocated memoryblock (like 80x80 pixel for eaxmple) and converting this pixels to final ascii values/chars you can display now on the console window... so you can precalculate things or doing things in realtime, if the rendered stuff -> ascii converting is fast enough. But at least afaik its not legal to use OGL, DX... just only Console and possible any DLL like bass, fmod to play music.

[Shockwave]

I am not clear on these rules either.

I don't think it would be illegal to do a straight conversion of some rendered framebuffer into an ascii picture, I thought that a lot of ascii demos do this anyway.. Anyway who's to say what api you should use to write a demo with?

[Jim]

I don't think it would be illegal to do a straight conversion of some rendered framebuffer into an ascii picture, I thought that a lot of ascii demos do this anyway

From what I can see they nearly all do this.  The smarts in these demos come from working out the mapping from the hidden colour buffer to the ascii output.
That demo you linked to recently seemed to use a combination of this technique along with some graphics rendered directly in ascii.

Jim

[ninogenio]

yeah jims right ive looked at some of the demo sources and they draw to a full r g b buffer and then use algos to try and closely match the ascii buffer with the full color buffer.

i dont think its necessary however, i just do all the drawing in the ascii buffer and with some of the stuff im messing around with, anti alias and alpha blending. drawing directly to the ascii buffer can be made to look quite good.

[ninogenio]

yay i finaly got alpha going

i had some trouble with the colors and fillers though.

[benny!]

Awesome. Glenz Vector ASCII ... very cool.

Exists fine by pressing ESCAPE - crashes when
hitting the CLOSE WINDOW Button though...

[ninogenio]

cheers benny!

yeah the program doesnt like it when you hit the exit button so escape is prefered, not quite sure how to get around that.

[rain_storm]

Very nice nino, for what its worth that exit error is typical of DOS text mode consoles such as mode 3h. Are you using DOS or win32?  Cos in DOS that error is due to the fact that the exit button passes through win32 and DOS emulation doesnt have access to win32 api

[ninogenio]

cheers mate,

that's what it will be then. good to know