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

[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

[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.

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

[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.

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!