Comments on: Red Letter Day: ASCIIPortal Out

By: LionsPhil

LionsPhil — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:00:41 +0000

(And it’s at this point that I recognize the avatar and realise we’ve already had an authorative source. Can haz post editing back plz?)

By: LionsPhil

LionsPhil — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:52:39 +0000

Aha, an authorative answer for this case:

The principal limitation of [the SDL port, which is what this game uses] is that input is currently restricted to ASCII (i.e., 0-127), plus the special keys like KEY_LEFT. (You could have Unicode input, but then the input wouldn’t match the output, which is in Code Page 437.)

Otherwise, because he hasn’t used the (limited) alternate character set constants, it seems to actually be undefined what non-ASCII values mean AFAICS (it’s left to the terminal to interpret).

By: LionsPhil

LionsPhil — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:42:45 +0000

Doesn’t appear to be—I’m not familiar with non-ASCII in curses, but the giveaway line is probably:
return (CharData[o][1] | color_pair(o) | A_ALTCHARSET);
I would take a guess that the ‘A_ALTCHARSET’ flag means the “OEM” code page, 437, as mentioned above. CharData[][1] are 8-bit values that look like they’d map to sensible CP437 glyphs. There’s also a field in the CharData array (I’m not sure why he didn’t use structs) for ‘File’, which appears to be normal ASCII characters used for map loading, at a glance. Looks like he’s written quite a lot about the development here if you’re interested (and have more time to spend on this than I ;) ).

By: MedO

MedO — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:19:52 +0000

So you’d be able to tell us then which charset it really uses? Is it UTF-8Portal perhaps?

By: LionsPhil

LionsPhil — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 03:06:16 +0000

…whoa, OK, open source and cross-platform, so I can answer that myself.

Perversely, he’s using a curses library (i.e. proper text console library), the SDL backend thereof. Looks like there’s a compile-time option to not do this, however, tinker-fans.

By: LionsPhil

LionsPhil — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:57:04 +0000

Am I right in thinking that, like Dwarf Fortress, this isn’t even a proper console application, though, but faked with blitting sprites (in DF’s case, via OpenGL and full-screen refreshes) that just happen to look like old DOS codepages?

Because heating up the 3D hardware to render this makes Baby Jesus cry.

By: Saul

Saul — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 23:29:54 +0000

Winner!

By: solipsistnation

solipsistnation — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:52:42 +0000

Well, I’m glad I’m not the only person thinking ASCII vs ANSI. HELLO FELLOW NERDS!

By: MedO

MedO — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:04:48 +0000

ASCII doesn’t have the Å-Character. There you go :D

By: orta

orta — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:12:05 +0000

the voice over rules

By: Gutter

Gutter — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:58:58 +0000

DO A BARREL ROLL!

Peanut style voices in a game… yay!

By: MacBeth

MacBeth — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:47:59 +0000