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[eigenbom]

those portraits are great, good work

[Joshua]

When I was playing your game I was wondering what you used to create the portraits. Good work and fun game!

[Quarry]

This thread actually inspired me to use more color and character variety in my rogues

[shpoonj]

What are the odds of getting ascii output? I'd love to be able to 'draw' some ascii art to throw into a project, but I'd need text!

[eigenbom]

My ascii-paint has .txt output but it doesn't include the colour info. The full ascii-paint .apf file format contains all the info and is fairly simple to parse, check out this file for the nitty gritty.

[JP]

Hello!  I've started working on another ASCII art tool that is a bit different:
* support for arbitrary charsets / palettes (C64, Atari 8-bit, DOS, ZX Spectrum, whatever)
* UI optimized for speed of the most common painting operations, ie high "flow"
* UI can scale up to any resolution
* UI renders in the current character set and palette (looks cool!)
* python/pygame instead of flash (+/-)
* open source

Screenshot!



A fairly recent version is here:
http://code.google.com/p/vectorpoem/downloads/list

Update: Windows EXE build here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mx85yxav8ta59g5/jtUWbn2ycV

Build notes:

EDSCII is an ASCII art editor supporting arbitrary color palettes and character sets.
This is the first build where the most basic of editing tools are usable.  The app loads/saves from/to a single file.

commands:
spacebar - bring up character + color selector
left-click - selected foreground color in color selector
right-click - selected background color in color selector
c - toggle character painting
f - toggle foreground color painting
b - toggle background color painting

My TODO list shows where I'm going with it:
http://code.google.com/p/vectorpoem/source/browse/trunk/petscii/todo.txt

Let me know what you think!  I'm very eager for some feedback, especially on the UI which I want to make the best of its kind.
If there's enough interest I'll give the thing its own thread.

[Triplefox]

I'd like to see a go-to common file format for all of these ASCII tools, because there's some barriers keeping them out of usage in games right now. I looked around a month or two back and ultimately implemented XBIN, which is a very cool and compact spec, designed to stream well over slow modem connections by interleaving color and character data in a single RLE stream. But it wasn't quite right for use in a modern ASCII game; for example, height was implicit, which made it kind of annoying to edit, at least in PabloDraw. And while it had entries for palette and character set, the character size was limited. It didn't have a notion of transparency. Et cetera.

My own ideas:

-JSON-based first - maybe later a binary form with IFF/FourCC style chunks. Ease of implementation is critical - we want to be able to bootstrap partial support in an engine just by eyeballing an example file. To grow the format, we can add more chunk types.
-Fixed, predefined modes for number of colors, characters, blink, transparency, etc. Pretty much all character-graphics systems in existence just take some power of 2 or boolean value for each of these properties, so I think we can decompose them into individual settings.
-A named character set and palette identifier, under the assumption that most assets are aiming to reuse an existing retro system, or address a common set for the game(which could be referenced in a nearby file).
-Custom character sets(this should be an all-or-nothing proposition - either you're using an existing set or you're completely replacing one - otherwise implementation is complex)
-Custom RGB palettes
-Planar layers. This allows for any combination of characters/attributes to be stacked and gives a straightforward path towards support for animations too - if the file has more layers than needed for the rendering mode, the extra layers are animation frames.
-No compression beyond the JSON/binary distinction. Adds too much implementation overhead, and we can always apply a generic compressor on top on distributables or(if creating assets for a real retrocomputer) write a custom exporter.

[eigenbom]

Yeh I agree that there's a technical barrier to their usage, but that's probably because there are such a wide variety of applications. Although i worked on it quite a while back now, i seem to recall that ascii-paint uses an uncompressed RIFF-based format, has layers, has transparency, has custom palettes and custom character sets. If you go digging maybe you'll see that your wishes are already fulfilled.

[Kurt]

I'm done with this program, I'm stopping before more stupid stuff like that happens again.

[TheBreadCat]

It took some time, but I think the result is ok

[Pineapple]

Yet another ANSI paint program appears!

Download!

This program can also open images produced by WEPaint.

[Kyzrati]

Hey eigenbom, just dropping by to say that your fork is so much more feature complete than the other editors I've tried over the years, it was a pleasure to work with.

I made this using your fork:


I'll soon be coding my own ASCII editor based largely on your feature set, though with some modifications I need to ensure more efficient workflow and better compatibility with X@COM. You can read more about it in my blog post.

On a side note, I absolutely love the collection of art that appeared in this thread back when it was active. I guess everyone's all all ASCII'd out now? Such an inspiring thread... (I even downloaded all the images and sometimes browse through them occasionally for fun.)

[eigenbom]

Hey eigenbom, just dropping by to say that your fork is so much more feature complete than the other editors I've tried over the years, it was a pleasure to work with.

Hey dude, some really great art you've done there. I love those hybrid ascii-art/roguelikes, good luck with yours! There's another thread with ascii-paint gifs in, so be sure to check those out too.

Are you forking ascii-paint or starting your own? The code base for ascii-paint is fairly straightforward so might be a good starting point..

[Kyzrati]

Ah yes, I forgot about that other thread. I'd seen it before a while back, though I think I prefer stills over animations. Also no more activity over there anymore, either

I'm starting my own project for this since I have a fair amount of experience writing editing tools, and am basing this one on my latest engine which is a breeze to code with--very flexible and in this case even faster than adapting/relying on an existing code base. I've only been working on the editor for a couple days now (the blog post I actually wrote up a few days ago before starting) and it's coming along nicely, already about 1/3 done.

[eigenbom]

Sounds awesome, I've added your rss stream to my reader. Good luck!

[Eigen]

I didn't want to start another ASCII thread, so I'm posting this here.

Norton Commander

╔════════════╤═══ C:\ ═╤════════╤══════╗╔════════════╤═══ A:\ ═╤════════╤══════╗
║    Name    │   Size  │  Date  │ Time ║║    Name    │   Size  │  Date  │ Time ║
║DOS         │►SUB-DIR◄│ 4-28-13│ 1:50a║║WOLF3D      │►SUB-DIR◄│ 5-05-92│ 4:23p║
║GAMES       │►SUB-DIR◄│ 4-28-13│ 2:37a║║SIMCITY     │►SUB-DIR◄│10-03-89│ 1:50a║
║MOUSE       │►SUB-DIR◄│ 4-28-13│ 2:19a║║STREETROD1  │►SUB-DIR◄│ 1-01-89│ 7:40a║
║NC          │►SUB-DIR◄│ 4-28-13│ 2:19a║║            │         │        │      ║
║autoexec bat│       24│ 4-28-13│ 1:50a║║            │         │        │      ║
║config   sys│      137│ 4-28-13│ 1:50a║║            │         │        │      ║
║            │         │        │      ║║            │         │        │      ║
║            │         │        │      ║║            │         │        │      ║
║            │         │        │      ║║            │         │        │      ║
║            │         │        │      ║║            │         │        │      ║
║            │         │        │      ║║            │         │        │      ║
║            │         │        │      ║║            │         │        │      ║
║            │         │        │      ║║            │         │        │      ║
║            │         │        │      ║║            │         │        │      ║
║            │         │        │      ║║            │         │        │      ║
║            │         │        │      ║║            │         │        │      ║
║            │         │        │      ║║            │         │        │      ║
║            │         │        │      ║║            │         │        │      ║
╟────────────┴─────────┴────────┴──────╢╟────────────┴─────────┴────────┴──────╢
║GAMES        ►SUB-DIR◄  4-28-13  2:37a║║WOLF3D       ►SUB-DIR◄  5-05-92  4:23p║
╚══════════════════════════════════════╝╚══════════════════════════════════════╝
C:\                                                                             
1Left__ 2Right_ 3View.. 4Edit.. 5Comp__ 6DeComp 7Find__ 8Histry 9EGA Ln 10Tree__


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[Eigen]

Damn it, it looks completely broken in all browsers on my work iMac ...

[Quarry]

Screenshot it and put in the screenshot along with the original version

[Kyzrati]

Sounds awesome, I've added your rss stream to my reader. Good luck!

Thanks, more or less done now--just released it here. (Of course, your rss will tell you that since I announced it on my dev blog, too ) I also started another thread on this board.

Back when I was using your fork to draw those X-COM concepts I must have downloaded an older version somehow since I never even saw that you implemented layers. Nor did I see the animation options or better anchor-based resize functionality. I looked for a manual, but didn't see one, either (no text files at all). It was even crashing on me and exhibiting strange behavior. I suppose the newer version's only available in the other thread--maybe the old link in this thread should be removed (surprised the old stuff is still around!).

[eigenbom]

Oh, you must be referring to the other ASCIIPaint program in this thread, not my ascii-paint program. Anyway, congrats on finishing your program. We can never have too many...