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[Werdna]

No, I know what ANSI the org is - they specified the extended character set.   What I am talking about is the vernacular - "ASCII" was the original character set used in games and art, with no lines or blocks or cursor animation.  When the ANSI standard came out they extended the ASCII set and added the lines and blocks and color that we are familiar with today.  To distinguish the two, everyone referred to this version of ASCII as "ANSI".  Example  It was important then because many legacy terminal programs could not display the new ANSI characters, which often led BBS's having two different splash screens, one ASCII and one ANSI.  I'm just curious when/how etymologically the computer community went back to referring to it all as ASCII (which is correct).

[puke]

I think its just a colloquialism.  Even your article describes it as the Extended ASCII Character set using ANSI escape sequences for color. 

As to when it fell out of fashion?  Probably around the time people started using HTML to colorize text instead of escape sequences, and tables and lines could be rendered directly in the markup without transmitting all of the characters. 

I tend to ballpark that as about 1994, but some folks were doing it sooner and some of the boards lasted later.  Still going today, if you want to point a Telnet client at an antique online bulletin board.

Here, play some LORD:  http://www.3dham.com/telnet/ 

[puke]

When the ANSI standard came out they extended the ASCII set and added the lines and blocks and color that we are familiar with today.  To distinguish the two, everyone referred to this version of ASCII as "ANSI".

Ah, I see the confusion.  This isn't actually true.

Basic ASCII is a standard put forward by X3.  Extended ASCII is an ISO specification.  ANSI (the body) has nothing to do with either one.  The only thing ANSI did was write some TTY specifications for formatting text.

Well, that and they determined how durable your steel-toed-boots need to be, for safety.  But that's neither here nor there.  The colloquialism you are describing is actually entirely incorrect.

Like, try asking an MMO player why they call things "Mobs".  They wont know, but they'll think it has something to do with bad pathing AI making NPCs rush you in a group or somesuch.  In reality, its a throwback to MUD/MUSH/MOO days and it refers to "Mobile Objects" and it became a common phrase because Everquest fell directly out of DikuMUD.  No one knows what it means now, but everyone uses it.

Shit, no one knew what it meant when Everquest was new, but that didn't stop everyone from saying it.

What you remember hearing people talk about is the same thing.  A phrase that had a basis in reality, but was being misinterpreted and misused.

[TempAcc]

Still watching this :v

[Draxis]

I've heard "ANSI" used to refer to Extended ASCII - i.e. CP 437 - which is used or modified for many roguelikes.  Not historically accurate, though.

[Werdna]

Spoiler: ANSI is ASCII quibbling (click to show/hide)

Basic ASCII is a standard put forward by X3.  Extended ASCII is an ISO specification.  ANSI (the body) has nothing to do with either one.  The only thing ANSI did was write some TTY specifications for formatting text.  Well, that and they determined how durable your steel-toed-boots need to be, for safety.

No, I know they were somehow related.  I had to dig around to find out what the exact relationship was though:

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was developed under the auspices of a committee of the American Standards Association, called the X3 committee, by its X3.2 (later X3L2) subcommittee, and later by that subcommittee's X3.2.4 working group. The ASA became the United States of America Standards Institute or USASI[15] and ultimately the American National Standards Institute.

So ASCII or X3 had become a subcommittee of ANSI, a much broader standards organization.  The ANSI name eventually got attached to the standards:


"The X3 committee made other changes, including other new characters (the brace and vertical bar characters),[31] renaming some control characters (SOM became start of header (SOH)) and moving or removing others (RU was removed).[32] ASCII was subsequently updated as USASI X3.4-1967, then USASI X3.4-1968, ANSI X3.4-1977, and finally, ANSI X3.4-1986 (the first two are occasionally retronamed ANSI X3.4-1967, and ANSI X3.4-1968)."

I suppose what happened is that PCs at the time began to natively use CP 437 as Draxis mentioned, which added the ASCII "extended" set (which is nebulous, but in our minds refers to the lines and blocks that can be seen in many of Kryzanti's mockups above); many BBS's began to take advantage of this native PC support for this particular extended character set, but you had to upgrade your terminal program to support this "ANSI" in order to correctly interpret the new codes.  Now that I think about it, I think we called it ANSI because that was exactly what the terminals showed in their status bars - if you didn't have "ANSI" displayed at the bottom of ZCom or whatever, you were going to be viewing garbage if you dialed into an ANSI-based BBS or an ANSI door game.  Wish I could find a screenshot but that era was sort of before screenshots...

The fact that we referred to the latest standard simply as "ANSI" is pretty amusing; that's like calling the latest iteration of WiFi as "IEEE" because it is based on the latest IEEE-802.11 standard.    Now I wonder why the terminal programs referred to it that way.

Like, try asking an MMO player why they call things "Mobs".  They wont know, but they'll think it has something to do with bad pathing AI making NPCs rush you in a group or somesuch.  In reality, its a throwback to MUD/MUSH/MOO days and it refers to "Mobile Objects" and it became a common phrase because Everquest fell directly out of DikuMUD.  No one knows what it means now, but everyone uses it.

Exactly!  To me it was fascinating that all my guild mates in WoW called them mobs, yet nearly none of them knew what a MUD was (which I distinctly recall contributing to a rather dismal set of my grades in college...    So it is curious to me that the then-common 'ANSI' reference to these sorts of graphics died out and reverted back to 'ASCII'.

What I may be recollecting however might be particular to BBS'rs however.  The distinction was important to us because if the terminal program didn't support the newer character set, then the 'ANSI' BBS's and games became inaccessible. Updating your terminal wasn't as easy as updating programs today.  Maybe the "ANSI" terminology was fairly unique to the BBS community.

Sorry to derail!

[puke]

Touche!

edit:  what I think is even MORE hilarious, is that the monsters in EQ weren't even mobile!  not in the MUD sense, anyway.  The characteristic of a MOb was that it could travel between rooms (otherwise it was just an Object that could attack), but in EQ you could shake pursuers by transitioning between zones.

Which is why you should never wait near the zone transitions, because some asshole is always going to lead a train of not-really-mobile objects into you.  Gosh I haven't MMO'd in a long time.

To bring this wild ride back on topic, I think it's actually REXPAINT that has killed ANSI.  Kyzrati, I blame YOOOOOU!

edit2:  in case that was obscure, you should see this thing.  It's boss:  http://rexpaint.blogspot.com/2013/09/ansi-has-landed.html    http://rexpaint.blogspot.com/p/gallery.html

[Kyzrati]

(none of that "what the hell is this" kinda stuff you sometimes see with ASCII games).

Well, as someone that fondly recalls the days of playing ASCII games on BBS's, I can say their reaction is likely due to the fact that your game visuals, even at this early stage, manage to transcend what most of us are used to seeing in ASCII-based games.  In fact your visuals remind me of the days when ASCII was used for art; many of those old BBS's and cracked games at the time would have these incredibly cool ASCII 'splash' images.  They were often really sweet pieces of art, sometimes even animated.  Somehow I've never really seen that art aesthetic make it into an ASCII game, until I started seeing your work.

Speaking of which, I'm curious - an old neuron just kicked in the back of my brain and reminded me that it isn't really ASCII, it's ANSI.  When did the use of the term ANSI to refer to the extended ASCII set die out?

Thanks, let the transcendence begin!

I can't say when, or if, usage of the term "ANSI" really died out from the mainstream, but in my experience it's true that a lot of people these days will (sometimes vaguely) know what ASCII is, but not ANSI. So recognition would be one reason to stick with the term ASCII, even though sometimes people say I'm wrong. Meh, technically "ASCII" can be short for / implies "extended ASCII," which is actually what I'm using and my own preferred term, but I'm not going to go typing that out every time

I also shy away from the term ANSI because to me the more commonly used form of so-called "ANSI art" uses colored blocks like large pixels, which is very different from line art (another valid form of ANSI art, but for some reason I feel like that's less representative of the tradition).

Two more reasons I prefer to de-emphasize the ANSI part:

• ANSI traditionally uses escape sequences, which is a technical specification and not something that I use. In fact, even with REXPaint I only later went back and added .ans output which requires that you edit in a special restrictive mode since ANSI escape sequences limit an image to a handful of colors.
  
• I don't use much of the wide range of characters in extended ASCII anyway. As you can read about in my earlier blog posts on fonts, everything in Cogmind except the static art pieces uses only alphanumerics, punctuation, and lines. That's a pretty tiny portion of 256. Even the art is mostly lines, with an occasional other glyph or three thrown in just to give it more "character" CP437 has quite a lot more to offer than I really use.

To bring this wild ride back on topic, I think it's actually REXPAINT that has killed ANSI.  Kyzrati, I blame YOOOOOU!

Yeah, I've read comments elsewhere discussing whether REXPaint is ASCII or ANSI. Again, a situation where I'm using "ASCII" to mean "extended ASCII," CP437. Maybe I'm feeding the spread of misinformation?

If I advertised it as tHe bEsTeSt cp437 aRt eDiToR! Everyone would be like... wha? I'm just going with what people know This way it's more likely to reach a larger user base.

(I know you're kidding, just pointing out real reasons =p)

[Werdna]

I also shy away from the term ANSI because to me the more commonly used form of so-called "ANSI art" uses colored blocks like large pixels, which is very different from line art (another valid form of ANSI art, but for some reason I feel like that's less representative of the tradition).

Hmm, I know what you mean, the block art was very common.  Line art was used a lot though in games at the time - if you google Trade Wars 2002 for screenshots you'll see what I mean (example).  At the time TW2002 was pretty state of the art, and your stuff puts it to shame.  I recall line art was mostly low-key, used mainly for making nice UIs for the BBS's and games.  When I ran my own BBS and designed my menus, the big program in that day was "TheDraw", it made using line art very easy.  Anyway, thanks for indulging my trip down memory lane.

[Kyzrati]

Coincidentally I looked up Trade Wars a couple months ago when someone mentioned that Cogmind brought back their memories of it. Hopefully we can get both the nostalgia crowd and the younger crowd on board

I remember playing BBS games in the late 80's/early 90's, but they were generally just text games with at most an ANSI splash screen.

I've heard of TheDraw as well, from REXPaint users in fact! Didn't know about it before that, though. Apparently it was pretty much the go-to program back then, where now we have quite a few options.

[sambojin]

Used it myself back in the day. Wasn't bad, but REXPaint probably shits all over it, especially because it's still on development. I remember TheDraw being a bit fiddly. I wonder if I can scavenge enough old pc bits together so I can recover my old 3dog:) ansi piccies (my old and very small bbs from my teen years. Three Dog Smiley).

Actually, REXPaint might be another avenue to get people interested in Cogmind. There is still a bit of a retro-ascii crowd about.

[Kyzrati]

Actually, REXPaint might be another avenue to get people interested in Cogmind. There is still a bit of a retro-ascii crowd about.

True, though the interest really goes more in the other direction. I mention REXPaint a lot on the Cogmind dev blog and that's one way people find it. In the end most people who know about REXPaint already know about my other projects. Not the biggest user base--maybe only a few hundred frequent users right now.

[Retropunch]

Actually, REXPaint might be another avenue to get people interested in Cogmind. There is still a bit of a retro-ascii crowd about.

True, though the interest really goes more in the other direction. I mention REXPaint a lot on the Cogmind dev blog and that's one way people find it. In the end most people who know about REXPaint already know about my other projects. Not the biggest user base--maybe only a few hundred frequent users right now.

I use Rexpaint at the moment and it's great  - so thanks very, very much for that!!.

I think the biggest problem with ascii in games is that for the most part, it's not as good of a way of representing information as using sprites. For instance, if you're looking at a room full of guns, in ascii you'll probably have to examine each gun to find out what it is, whereas tiles can show you instantly. However, the retro look is cool.

Cogmind is different though, because it's actively using ASCII as a choice, rather than as a convenient way not to do graphics.

[Kyzrati]

Actually, REXPaint might be another avenue to get people interested in Cogmind. There is still a bit of a retro-ascii crowd about.

True, though the interest really goes more in the other direction. I mention REXPaint a lot on the Cogmind dev blog and that's one way people find it. In the end most people who know about REXPaint already know about my other projects. Not the biggest user base--maybe only a few hundred frequent users right now.

I use Rexpaint at the moment and it's great  - so thanks very, very much for that!!.

I think the biggest problem with ascii in games is that for the most part, it's not as good of a way of representing information as using sprites. For instance, if you're looking at a room full of guns, in ascii you'll probably have to examine each gun to find out what it is,

Funny you should mention that because technically in the 7DRL you did have to examine each symbol to know specifically what each part is. It was pretty quick since you could just hover your cursor or press keys to cycle through objects, but I just recently added a new labeling feature to Cogmind that where you can call up labels for different types of object at the press of a button! Check out an example of the part labels:

(The gif is kinda jerky while opening the labels because I was running in debug mode.)

Even better, these labels will appear instantly and automatically for newly spotted items and robots while you're exploring. You can optionally turn this stuff off, but I doubt you'd want to given how much more efficient it is!

One of the upcoming posts has a huge number of examples of UI feedback like this.

Glad you're enjoying REXPaint. It will continue to grow in the future as I find interesting features to add, though right now it does quite a lot, so much so that I should find a better menu system to improve feature discovery and accessibility for mouse users. Fortunately most people who care about ASCII are good with keyboards , but even I sometimes forget commands for some of the lesser-used features.

[Zireael]

Wow, labels! Can I steal the idea for my game? (no idea if it can be implemented though)