Ye Olde Ascii games...

BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Beginners Area/Ye Olde Ascii games...

Ryan Burnside (Posted 2008) [#1]

I'm interested in making a game in the old ascii style. I would like to emulate the look perfectly. Is there any sort of display that is text only in Blitzmax (maybe a debug mode or console window)? If not I'd imagine that I'm going to have to store screen data in a 2d array and draw images of mono spaced text. What is the best way to handle this sort of display?

JazzieB (Posted 2008) [#2]

By ASCII, do you mean something like a text adventure? You can use a DOS window, but you'll be very limited to the commands that you'll be able to use. Pretty much just Print and Input, with no way of positioning text. You won't be able to re-size the window either. To use it, simply uncheck "Build GUI App" from the Program > Build Options menu. Within the IDE it will run in the debug/console window, but when run outside of the IDE it will open a DOS window. There is no other text mode that can be used, so you'll be better off emulating such a screen using a bitmap font or a suitable font with DrawText. The latter may be a bit slow, but as this will be a text game, it shouldn't matter.

Bremer (Posted 2008) [#3]

I would also just do like JazzieB suggest and use a bitmap font with fixed width characters and then draw the "screen" based on the level 2d array.

GaryV (Posted 2008) [#4]

If you are using Windows, you can create a Console Window via API and size it, as well as control the colors used for text and move the cursor around.

Ryan Burnside (Posted 2008) [#5]

I thought I'd have to go that route. Thanks for the help.

Sledge (Posted 2008) [#6]

There's already a Conio wrapper for Max.