ASCII Portal In the Works

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.

Comments

Innovative

[sopssa]

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 :)

Re:Innovative

[corsec67]

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 that as well, with almost no graphics at all, but it would be hard to make a text based action game. (Now there is a challenge, and some probably already exist)

Re:Innovative

[RenHoek]

There are some modern games still being produced in ASCII, like Dwarf Fortress.

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

[X0563511]

"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.

Re:Innovative

[johannesg]

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.

Re:Innovative

[sopssa]

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 include World of Goo and Braid. They're fully 2D and contain great gameplay. I also love LittleBigPlanet on PS3, which is 2D like platform but with stunning 3D graphics. The fact it has great graphics doesn't reduce it great gameplay mechanism.

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. Graphics are there to make the immersion; gameplay is there to make it fun. When done correctly, those two *DO* work together.

Re:Innovative

[zwei2stein]

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 games) and it was pain to play. Mazes of random rooms are not pleasant to navigate at all if you do it from first person view...

Re:Innovative

[cgomezr]

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, 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.

Re:Innovative

[TheRaven64]

There's 2D, and there's poor graphics. I found the flash game based on portal to be a lot of fun. It had simple graphics, but they were good enough to make the game fun without having to memorise a list of symbol to thing mappings. In some ways, I found this more fun than the original. A lot of the puzzles in portal seemed to be 'jump through this portal and then, while you're rotating, hit this small bit of wall,' while the puzzles I enjoy most are the ones where you have to figure out which bit of wall to hit. The ASCII version seems to be very similar to the flash one with a few tweaks.

Re:Innovative

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Not ASCII

[Archaemic]

I hate to be the pedantic one to point this out, but this isn't ASCII. It might even be pushing it to call it ANSI, but it's certainly a closer classification. Looks more like CP 437 than anything else.

...anyone else remember ZZT? I do.

Re:Not ASCII

[Anonymous Coward]

Liar. You love being the pedantic one.

Re:Not ASCII

[LSD-OBS]

You ASCII stupid question, you get a stupid ANSI.

Re:Not ASCII

[fm6]

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, or maybe CP 437. The Wikipedia article on CP 1242 claims that it's called "ANSI" because of confusion with Latin 1, 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

[Rooked_One]

That is one of those coolest things i've seen in a while. I used to love programming stuff with basic graphics on the apple 2's, so this really takes me back. I'm not sure if the apple II's would have the horsepower to pull of the "spins" though ;)

outro

[rarel]

And as a bonus, the ending video will be entirely redone with mocap CGI ;)

Speaking of Valve Source games conversions...

[naz404]

Check out Left 4k Dead -> Left 4 Dead in 4kb! It's pretty fun and the sourcecode's available too.

Re:Speaking of Valve Source games conversions...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an idiot! Congratulations!

P.S. no link should crash any browser, it's not the link's fault your browser sucks.

Portal was never about the graphics anyway

[judolphin]

The best games never are.

You can do this with any SDL game

[m50d]

Just set your SDL_VIDEODRIVER to aalib (or better, caca, for colour). Ascii frozen bubble can be quite fun.

Another non-3D version of Portal

[Twinky]

Cool.

Until this project is finished, may I recommend Portal: The Flash Game ?

So do you mean...

[FlyByPC]

...the cake is a li--ne drawing?

Such advanced graphics techniques... for ASCII?

[marciot]

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!

Re:Such advanced graphics techniques... for ASCII?

[jack2000]

It's about time GPUs were put to work the way they were always meant to ...