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Textmode Quake 2

Artemis writes: "Following the Quake 2 source code release under the GPL, here's the follow-up of the famous ttyquake, it's a text mode Quake II called aaquake2 which has just been released. Time for more 3d text mode gaming fun! The site includes screenshots for those of you who haven't seen Quake-turned-Text before."

34 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm... by senine · · Score: 3, Interesting


    I wonder how much bandwidth it would take to play this via a telnet interface.

    -Senine

  2. Forget first post by grahamsz · · Score: 3, Funny

    Someone evidently feels the need to be right at the top of every list of downloads

    aaquake indeed

  3. Forget it. by Matt2000 · · Score: 5, Funny


    This is such bullshit, I've seen this kind of hoax before. All they do is have a bunch of guys sitting at their computer and as each move request come in, they just type out the screen on their keyboard and send it back to your viewer. When they get tired, it's called "lag."

    Wake up slashdot and check out your stories before you post them!

    --

  4. cool by GoatPigSheep · · Score: 3, Funny

    this is great, but we all know what the true ascii enthusiast needs: a text-mode version of x-windows

    --
    GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
  5. Allright! by Hercynium · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now I can really test the pixel output of my brand-new geForceRS232vt220turbo!!!

    Imagine a beowulf clus... ah nevermind.

    --
    I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
  6. It could work by Chazmati · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well, with sufficiently small characters, it should look fine. In fact, as you approach a 1-pixel font it should look quite nice. Add color and you're there. Oh, wait...

    1. Re:It could work by nick_davison · · Score: 5, Funny

      "In fact, as you approach a 1-pixel font it should look quite nice. Add color and you're there."

      Approximate with just a constant brown font. This is Quake after all, no one'll know.

  7. Oh man.. I love the sickness!! by Indes · · Score: 4, Funny

    I remember playing ttyquake for the first time.. played for an hour and couldn't make it past the first level.. got lost so many times.. after playing for the hour I felt sick to my stomach for days but the pain was worth it..

    LIVE ON TEXTMODE QUAKE!! LIVE ON!!!!!!

    This is fast becomming one of my favourite things to rant about.. textmode gaming!!

    The future is here. ;-)

  8. In case you couldn't use the link above by jsse · · Score: 4, Informative

    The link above seems to be slashdotted, try this one.

  9. Example for mandatory open sourcing by ShieldWolf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This gives us an interesting example of what Lawrence Lessig suggested earlier: mandatory source code release after a set period of time for software, which follows a reasonably short period of exclusivity.

    This guys speech, as weird and freaky as it is ;), would have not have come to light if Quake II had not been open-sourced after it ceased to become cutting-edge technology. By releasing the code after a reasonable period of time Carmack has given us a golden lesson in copyright. By putting the source in more hands we get more speech and interesting ideas put into the public domain, this is the kinda of thing closed source and excessively long copyright terms deny, e.g. Looking forward to David Fincher's Catcher in The Rye? Keep waiting, that book will still be in copyright over 70 years from now, and he will be long dead.

    -Shieldwolf

    PS - of course I know the software is still under copyright, e.g. GPL via Id Software, I merely mean that it is gives you an IDEA of how this could work.

    --
    just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
  10. [OT] Textmode Quake 2 by pgilman · · Score: 5, Funny


    from the we-will-be-getting-duplicate-submissions-of-this-f or-weeks dept.

    and given your recent track record i guess you'll post it a couple more times as well &nbsp ;-)

    --
    if i'm a grammar nazi, you're an illiteracy nazi.
    1. Re:[OT] Textmode Quake 2 by ThatComputerGuy · · Score: 3, Funny

      Yes, for the reposts "here and there". It's just too bad every other day isn't "here and there".

      On Taco, on Hemos, on Michael! Post those dupes!

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
  11. A Horrible Rift by Bios_Hakr · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...just appeared in the universe. When ttyquake was released, God cried at the absolute wrongness of it. But after this, he has torn the universe asunder. The only way to clense his creation of the horrible mistake is to purge all life from the Galaxy. Yea, even as it happened in the day of Moses, a great flood is being brought down upon us.

    In related news, astrophysicists everywhere stood in amazement as the expanding universe slowed, stopped, and began to collapse back on itself.

    Also of note, astronomers in the Northern Hemisphere were baffled by the apperance of a new constilation. The collection of never-before-seen stars actually spelled out a phrase. "1 0wn3d j00" could clearly be read in Hebrew.

    --
    I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
  12. So Paint The ASCII Green And ... by Freneticus · · Score: 3, Offtopic

    Taa-daa! Instant Matrix in a box!

    Keanu: "What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge rockets?"

    Bad Mutha Lawrence Fishburne the III:"No, Keanu. I'm trying to tell you that, when you're ready ... you won't have to."

    Keanu: (pauses) "Dude, you just don't want me camping on the railgun, do you?"

    Bad Mutha Lawrence Fishburne the III: "Damn, you've figured me out! Now eat my boomstick!"

    BANG!

  13. Uh, use you "brain"... *smacks chest* by Lethyos · · Score: 5, Flamebait

    First of all, let's figure out how big a frame is. If you have a matrix, like in a terminal, which consists of rows and columns, there is a powerful technique called "multiplication" that will allow you to calculate how many elements there are in this matrix. So, we compute the width (w) by the height (h) to get a product (p), in the form: w*h=p. Whew! That was tricky, but it gets more complicated! Consider that each character on the terminal (for ASCII, not Unicode) is one byte. That is eight bits. Since bandwidth is measured in bits, this what we're interested in. So, we take our product (p) and do that crazy "multiplication" thing again in: p*8. WOW! But let's not slow down there!! We're almost near the end! The result of p*8 (which is actually (w*h)*8, surprisingly) is only for one frame! So what do we do? Think that maybe the average number of frames we'll get per second is 20. That means, that every second, 20 frames of p*8 bits passes through the wire. You know what that means, MORE multiplication! p*8*20, crazy, isn't it? It comes down to (w*h)*160 bits per second. So now, all YOU gotta do is figure out how big your terminal is, and that's now many bits/second it costs! Isn't math fun? (DISCLAIMER: this does not take into account compression, or encoding scemes used to reduce the number of characters sent/received.)

    --
    Why bother.
    1. Re:Uh, use you "brain"... *smacks chest* by Surak · · Score: 3

      DISCLAIMER: this does not take into account compression, or encoding scemes used to reduce the number of characters sent/received

      Nor does it take into account whether the whole screen is being updated each time, the overhead of the protocol, and the overhead of the terminal emulation. I.e., for a typical VT-102/ANSI type terminal, moving the cursor up 10 rows, for instance, involves <Esc>[10A. That's five extra bytes. Note that I don't know if the software relocates the cursor or draws every character in every frame as I have only a passing familiarity with AALib.

      On the other hand, your comment was funny enough that it did make me spit my Pepsi all over the screen. :-)

  14. No color? by exceed · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Why doesn't this game have color capabilities?

    While I think this is pretty neat (porting a 3D game to text), the screenshot makes it apparent to me that playing the game in black and white would suck. It's hard to distinguish the stairs to the right of you, you can hardly make out the gun, and the crosshairs aren't even visible. What good is a first person game without visible crosshairs?

    Bravo for porting Q2, but could we please get some color?

    --

    void women (int money, time_t time);
    1. Re:No color? by Mawbid · · Score: 3, Funny
      What good is a first person game without visible crosshairs?

      Dude, get a felt tip pen and draw one on your monitor.

      --
      Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
  15. It's as fast as your network by Erris · · Score: 3, Funny
    Dude, I just insalled it on my spare beowulf pocket cray cluster. Though it's graphics engine was capable of running the holodeck, I decided I'd be better off using a telnet session. Here's a screen shot, honest:

    You are in a dark room.

    An imp has shot you.

    darkness decends, you are dead.

    There was a page of text characters that represented a dark room for most of the above transaction. I'll attibute the blazing display of that page on the awsome power of the token ring network adaptor used.

    --
    DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
  16. I beat them to it. by Jennifer+E.+Elaan · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I had Quake2 in textmode long before this. I hacked the aaquake svgalib-emulator module so that it supported multiple video pages.

    I'm updating my homepage right now with some screenshots, see it at my homepage.

  17. This has been done with Quake2: by netfunk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Relnev's Quake2 already had SDL support, so if you ran it as:

    export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=aalib
    ./quake2

    You would get the same results. And, when you get quickly bored of it, the same binary can do the regular graphics, too.

    (SDL just uses AAlib as one of the drivers, so effectively, you get the same end result with either project, but this is more unified, and unified is good.)

    Relnev's project page and cvs-over-the-web.

    --ryan.

    --
    Don't say, "don't quote me," because if no one quotes you, you probably haven't said a thing worth saying.
  18. Try "twin" by cout · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's a window manager for your terminal. http://linuz.sns.it/~max/twin/

  19. Re:I have just one question..... by ColaMan · · Score: 3, Funny

    Excuse me while a go write a program that will help Windows render my wallpaper as a text box of ASCII characters...


    You don't need to - recent versions of windows already has a program (called kernel32) that randomly renders your wallpaper as a blue screen with indecipherable text upon it. It's not usually enabled with a straight out of the box install of windows though. Best way to get the blue text renderer going is to actually try and do some serious work with your windows computer. Ensuring that you do not save your work for at least an hour will often cause the renderer to appear as well.

    Hope this helps.

    --

    You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
    There is a lot of hype here.
  20. Re:Blind FPS Interface by scott1853 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    For a blind person you wouldn't want a direct translation of the video output, it contains more data than is necessary. For a blind person to interpret all the data in realtime, they would only need to be able to "see" the floor and wall, basically a top-down view, complete with bad guys. Something about the size of a hand with rods or blocks that move up and down to indicate things like walls or stairs or baddies. The device should pivot so they can rotate their hand to "look" in different directions. They wouldn't need to be able to turn their hand all the way around since everything is relative you could make a 30 degree rotation into a 180.

  21. Criminalizing secrets by volpe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    MANDATORY source code release? You want to make it a crime to keep your own information secret for as long as you choose, if that information happens to be source code? Why stop there? Here's a few other things we can make subject to mandatory release after a set period of time:

    1. Your PIN
    2. Your PGP key and passphrase
    3. Your diary
    4. Any recorded discussions between you and your attorney.
    5. Your complete medical history.

    The government is obtrusive enough as it is. I don't want the government to be able to force anyone to release information that they don't want to, just because some arbitrarily chosen timer has run out.

    1. Re:Criminalizing secrets by coldmist · · Score: 5, Interesting

      From the way I understand it from Lessig,

      The difference is whether you want copyright protection for said program or not. If you want it copyrighted, then hand the source code over to the copyright office, and after x years, they release it upon request, after you have had your chance to make your $$$.

      If you don't ever want your source code out there, you don't have to file for a copyright. But, then people could copy/hack the binaries all they wanted.

      Interesting tradeoff!

      --
      Don't steal. The government hates competition.
    2. Re:Criminalizing secrets by nathanh · · Score: 3, Insightful
      The government is obtrusive enough as it is.

      But copyright only exists because the government intrudes. If the government didn't intrude then we'd have the situation of 200 years ago where people were copying data freely, much to the annoyance of the authors and publishers. If anything, the poster you were responding to was asking that the government intrudes less.

      I don't want the government to be able to force anyone to release information that they don't want to

      And nobody was asking them too. You seem to have confused copyright with privacy.

  22. That's it! I'm not human!! by erroneus · · Score: 5, Funny

    There is just something wrong and inhuman about my ability to perceive in a way that is similiar to all other humans. Here is a short list of things I cannot read:

    1. Music
    2. Prenatal sonograms
    3. tty Quake and Quake2

    Now, I've been able to see those "optical illusions" in the Sunday funnies. I can even read hiragana, katakana and a few Kanji characters as well. But those three things and probable a few others I can't think of right now escape me entirely!

    I can't "see" the sound it's [music] supposed to make. I can't "see" the baby and I certainly can't tell if it has a penis or not. I can't tell where I'm going on those screens!!!

    Am I alone in this?!

  23. An upgrade by Luggage · · Score: 5, Interesting
  24. Paper Quake by DeadBugs · · Score: 3, Funny

    Now just send the text output to your printer, staple the pages together and make a nice animated quake flip book. If you flip the pages fast enough you should get a faster frame rate than most high end video cards.

    --
    http://www.kubuntu.org/
  25. I agree somewhat, but this is apples and oranges by oGMo · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The government is obtrusive enough as it is. I don't want the government to be able to force anyone to release information that they don't want to, just because some arbitrarily chosen timer has run out.

    I agree, but this isn't the same thing. It's not really different from, say, copyrights expiring after a reasonable period of time (read: a few years, 7 max for software, just like when copyright law was originally enacted). The limit on software should probably be 3-4 years due to the extremely short lifespan.

    In fact, it could be made a part of software copyright law that for a copyright to be granted on a piece of software, it as well as the source must be released into the public domain after the 4-year copyright period.

    This is a far stretch from requiring private, personal information from individuals. It's just the original spirit of the copyright law returned. But don't expect to see something so sane get passed, large corporations are making too much off the laws as they are, and pushing for even worse ones like the DMCA and SSSCA.

    (Personally I think corporations should be required to disclose all information publically at all times, except for "trade secret" information, which can stay secret for at most a year or two. Patents should not be applicable against individuals or non-commercial entities, only against commercial corporations. Copyrights should also be reduced to 7 years again. But then I might as well wish for world peace or something. :-P)

    --

    Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage

  26. Oh, I get it by eyeball · · Score: 5, Funny
    I thought they meant something like this:

    QUAKE II
    Copyright (c) 1991-2001. All rights reserved.

    West of steaming pit of hell
    You are standing in an open room west of a steaming pit of hell leading down.
    There is a gun here.

    >
    --

    _______
    2B1ASK1
  27. More AA Lib Action in an X Server! by Juggler+cant+juggle · · Score: 3, Informative

    Some fool compiled an xserver with aalib and you can see the output including screenshots of enlightenment menus etc here:

    http://www.meow.org.uk/stan/xserver/

    Maybe that'd work with xquake?

  28. Someone actually did that for doom by ColGraff · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You can find the game (I forget if it's TADS of INFORM, sorry) at ifarchive.org .

    --
    I'm the stranger...posting to /.