Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[sphr]

note: "ascii" and "gfx" in quotes.

=my position=
I'm not a vehement ascii-only supporter, though I enjoy and appreciate good ascii art.
I'm not anti-ascii too, though I don't mind gfx.
But I think I can be somewhat qualifieid to speak for a group of people, though not all, since I am myself, a programmer that uses ascii art many times in the past.  Below is not really an argument or a invitation of debate but just a summary of my own views and experience, in hope of perhaps drawing people's attention to the more important stuff underneath the all-too-simple ASCII versus non-ASCII kind of arguments.  No offence(really!  merely being honest), but to tell the truth, these kind of arguments are kind of funny and sometimes even laughable to me, and perhaps to other programmers that uses ascii art.

=ascii charset vs ascii art=
First of all, I see ascii and ascii-art as two things.  ascii is just a simple codepage of characters with some default glyphs.  period.  I don't attach feelings to it, let alone worship it or anything.  It's just a tool.  ascii-art on the other hand, is art.  E.g. the clever choice of certain characters to represent certain things that gives end-users thoughts like "it makes sense!" or "that's appropriate!".  Or more, the combined use of individual characters to create more complex and interesting gfx (yes. imo it should be considered as gfx. however, I personally excludes those automatically generated from images that just uses ascii chars as nothing but pixels, which doesn't really have the "art" part of ascii art).  Try to keep in mind which is the painting and which is the paint.

=history=
Early programmers/ascii artists did not choose to use ascii.  It's the only choice we have.  Back then, PC was young (and still IBM!!!!) and most Universities runs Unix supercomputers that takes up entire levels of buildings but may run slower that a modern handphone.  These are accessed through monochrome dumb terminals (monitor+keyboard.  no local cpu/storage/whatever).  All we have are text characters.  Most applications uses direct text (the entirely text-based sgml "browser", mail reader, text editor, text games, mud).  Ascii art is borned there, as an expression of unbounded imagination in terms of limited resources, of using the text characters beyond the semantic meanings of the character. I never took the effort to find out exactly where it started... could be simple smilies in emails that grows larger and larger???

=the scarcity of pixel gfx=
Anyway, even with the coming of PC and CGA and graphics mode, graphical applications are still not very widespread, prob due to the fact that graphics editing software is almost non-existent for home PC (We don't even have mice!!! and Windows hasn't been developed!).  At that time graphics was dominated by very very expensive mac machines that most people have no access to (except like 1 or 2 in schools?).  What all these means is that to create pixel-based gfx is very very hard. I remember that my first pixel-basd gfx editor is one that I wrote myself using basica and KEYBOARD!!!!  Imagine, for those of you who have never experienced this period, using cursor keys to move the "pen" around 1 pixel at a time and using other keys to do things like toggle drawing, mark lines/rectangles/circles, using a complicated way to select color... and then save the pixel data in some amateur format that cannot be loaded anywhere else except that your own program.... all this limited by 360k floppy disks and 64k memory. LOL... the good ol'days, but I digressed.  In anyway, the POINT is: gfx is tough.  That's the reason why a lot of people took to ascii-art instead, as text manipulation is easier by orders of magnitude.

=the desire to be big but still small=
Another reason prob why a lot of programmers like using ascii-art could be the inexplicable desire to achieve optimal performance within a certain space-time constraint.  To put in human terms : we want to achieve the most with the least resources.  It's not just being economic or practical with the resources.  To some programmers it's an achievement comparable to that of climbing a mountain or breaking a sports record or something.  The words "optimality" and "efficiency" brings a fuzzy feeling of warmth when embraced and an elegant construct is comparable to a real work of art like statue or armor stand or something   Ahem, what I REALLY wanted to say is: there is actually no conflict between the ascii-vs-non-ascii arguments here, as DF provides both.  ascii supporters have no real reason to be anti-non-ascii (double negative!!) if it can be recognized that it's not the ascii charset themselves that deserves to be "worshipped".  In the same manner, I feel that it is unfair and sometimes a little rude when people chastise non-ascii stuff because the effort and creativity people put in behind those stuff may not be less than that of the ascii-artist.  On the other hand, people who can't stand ascii art should also be more understanding instead of trying to force their own preferences into the situation without understanding some of the history and rationale behind the evolution.  Personally, I find some of the remarks (may not be in this forums) close to insulting, as one who uses ascii-art myself.  Wish I could throw them a 8086 with nothing but gwbasic in their face and then ask them to program Oblivion for me. ahem... pardon the lapse of self-control.

=In 3 lines(eh.. or maybe 4 or 5 or ...)=
This entire long-winded post full of redundant stuff can be summarized as follow:
1) Show respect for ascii-art and the history behind it.  Without it and the spirit it represents, you won't get where you are now.  It's like turning a blind eye to the art just because one did not like the medium.

2) Stop restricting the exact same spirit behind that which drives ascii-art by claiming that the whole world should be in ascii and ascii only.  It's as disrespectful as the first case.  It's like undermining the artist just by claiming the superiority of a medium and just any crap that uses the medium is art.

3) But put the more serious tone from above aside.... I feel that there are many cases where the mention of ascii versus non-ascii is more jokes or attempts at humour (which I think are quite often in these forums... but I could be just naive).  I myself do the same sometimes.  It could be because of the difficulty in expression emotion in typed text that sometimes results in the sad situation where jokes get misunderstood as arguments.  So before anybody starts another "ascii"-vs-"gfx" flame war, try to see if it is really a playful slap on the shoulder or a real taunt.  Though personally, I don't mind observing a flamewar which can sometimes be quite entertaining, maybe there are more productive means to channel those surplus energies?? (go build more fortress/write more stories/do more mods)

Ok.  Moderator! (ToadyOne?) quick! close this thread before the flamings start to hurl at me.  :O

[Armok]

I actually agree.
I use to be one of the most fanatic ASCII spokesmen on this forum, but really essentially this is what I to think at the core. The thing I realy mean whit that is that Toady should spend no time on the graphics or UI because they are already perfect. I hope I still will play it in ASCII for historical value anyways, but you never know...

Edit: grammar.

[ January 22, 2008: Message edited by: Armok ]

[Fenrir]

HERETIC! BLASPHEMER! ASCII IS THE BEGINNING AND THE END, THE ALPHA AND OMEGA! ASCII WILL NEVER DIE!!!1111ONEONEONE   ). I may get a little over zealous sometimes, but I also think that people overreact to my overreacting.

[John Johnston]

I have a modern machine that will run just about anything in graphical loveliness without breaking a sweat.  I'm spending half my time playing DF on it, because DF (for me at least) is simply the most interesting sandbox game in existence (and quite possibly of all time).  

My opinion is that (again, for me at least) DF is not improved substantially by tilesets replacing the ASCII graphics.  It would, I think, be improved with a reasonable 3d engine - it would be fantastic to be able to pan and rotate around the place in 3d, or zoom in and follow dwarves through the bowels of the earth a la Dungeon Keeper - , but not with anything short of that.  I suspect that this is more or less within the capacity of a top-range machine today (as in, "if DF is only using one core, what are the other three doing?") but would need a whole bunch of people to actually implement.  Marry Toady One with a studio full of 3d artists and so on and I'm sure it could be done, but anything like that would also probably seriously detract from DF's protean charm.  Maybe when it gets to Beta stage.  

[subject name here]

I think DF would be substantially improved if it had a graphics engine, but that's probably because I'm a sick fuck who enjoys tons of blood and gore in his entertainment which DF has in abundance.

In my opinion the Ascii vs Graphics war is pretty much the OS wars only 10000x nerdier and just as humorous (As in not at all funny). The arguments from both sides are simply embarrassing and painful to read, so much that they're used as a form of torture in Gitmo when they decide waterboarding is too light.

[ January 22, 2008: Message edited by: Sheogorath ]

[briktal]

quote:Originally posted by John Johnston:
<STRONG>My opinion is that (again, for me at least) DF is not improved substantially by tilesets replacing the ASCII graphics.  It would, I think, be improved with a reasonable 3d engine - it would be fantastic to be able to pan and rotate around the place in 3d, or zoom in and follow dwarves through the bowels of the earth a la Dungeon Keeper - , but not with anything short of that.  I suspect that this is more or less within the capacity of a top-range machine today (as in, "if DF is only using one core, what are the other three doing?") but would need a whole bunch of people to actually implement.  Marry Toady One with a studio full of 3d artists and so on and I'm sure it could be done, but anything like that would also probably seriously detract from DF's protean charm.  Maybe when it gets to Beta stage.    </STRONG>

There's really one big improvement you get from that: everything can have its own image.  That's really the main limitation of the "ASCII only" system.

[Red Jackard]

Yes, with it you could have nice tilesets without distorting the font.

[Mike Mayday]

quote:Originally posted by Armok:
<STRONG>Toady should spend no time on the UI because it is already perfect.</STRONG>

What

[Zonhin]

quote:Originally posted by Mike Mayday:
<STRONG>

What</STRONG>

Armok is a raging fanboy.

[Bricktop]

I like DF for the depth in the game. The actual detail that is in it and everything... basically, I like the game.

The ascii-graphics... I can live with them. They don't detract too much from the game and so they don't bother me (although I think that when Tile-whatsits do get put in they will be a big improvement).

Oh, and the UI is not perfect. It is far from perfect. It is horribly painful to get used to. Its also pretty low priority compared to the rest of the stuff planned though, so meh.  

[Reasonableman]

This, and the many posts like it on these forums, prove to me one single thing: coalesced here are the most intelligent and reasonable people ever assembled on the internet. Even if the subject of our debate is something so seemingly insignificant as the choice of art direction in a videogame (albeit the most complicated and choc-full of emergent behavior game of all time,) the language and thought put into it is of the highest caliber to be found on the series of trucks that connect our computers. Strangely, we have never attempted to redirect our collected intellectual talent into a productive enterprise, for instance a debate forum or perhaps some sort of community collaboration on topics seperate from Dwarf Fortress (if there is anything truly separate considering the rate at which it expands in its never-ending quest to simulate all of existence.) This forum has the lowest instance of random idiotic spamming of the sort seen on many an XBox Live chatroom, or perhaps forums that debate the superiority of Star Wars and Star Trek (Star Trek FTW!)
All in all, somehow this "simple" game has managed to collect about it a number of highly intelligent people who's idea of a fun time is determining how to construct a computer within a computer program, and/or making digital kitten leather into shoes. Whether this is disturbing or wonderful has yet to be seen, and hopefully one day our joined intelligence shall allow us to achieve something the intertubes has yet to see: a reasonable group of people, behaving reasonably.

And that is all I have to say about that.

EDIT: I missed a single "a."

[ January 22, 2008: Message edited by: Reasonableman ]

[Tahin]

The only reason I use a tileset is because it makes it easier to recruit for adventure mode (Can't tell peasants from swordmen... Humans need better characters, is all), and that I'm too lazy to change it back.

Personally, I like the ASCII. It prevents others from seeing what I'm doing, for the most part, and allows for a good bit more creativity than, for instance, Oblivion does.

[umiman]

ASCII doesn't really allow for the imagination to roam, which is a good thing if you have a somewhat limited imagination and can only read the lines of text and not what lies underneath.

Well, I mean this from a storytelling viewpoint. One of the great appeals of Dwarf Fortress lies in envisioning how your dwarves do the things they do. An example of which would be during a battle. You could... say... with this image:

code:

.........
..@......
.....g...

quote:Asmar Lokiilamar stood firmly at his post, swinging his black-blood axe with the fury of Armok himself. One by one, goblins fell to his brazen fury. Hark as heads are blasted off their sockets and arms seemingly incinerated in the inferno of battle. Then, the Goblin King himself, Nob Guragugansh the Immortal Sin strode forth to the usurper. In one hand, Sinkul Argabash, The Fiery Plague, a dark obsidian crusted axe the size of Asmar himself. The other, a shield of blackest black, punctuated with the head of Asmar's wife of 200 years crusted on the edge.

Asmar roared aloud. His pupils glowed. Goblin and goblin body all around were blasted aside from the sheer magnitude of the cry and steam erupted from newly-torn red earth. He launched himself, bathed in the essence of his enemies, at the Eternal Ruler of All Goblinkind, blade in hand and death in mind. Sinkul Argabash, The Fiery Plague clashed with dwarven-rune embued steel and the ground shook and shattered as two great warriors dueled among their fallen comrades.

A brutal kick from a menacing iron high boot shattered Asmar's ribs and punctured his  insides. Blood drained from the weakening dwarf but he smiled; his own blood lining his grit and dirt-infested teeth. His blade too, was embedded in the rough and gnarled chest of Nob Guragugansh and the twisted soul of the Goblin King had been cast from the plane. In this place, Asmar Lokiilamar passed on.

But when you have actual, detailed (the key word here being detailed) graphics, you lose much of the creative freedom you can weave without having to break from the mechanics of the game itself.

[Keilden]

Besides...think of the lag 3d graphics would cause if this game lags in ASCII.

[subject name here]

I don't get that whole "Ascii allows more user creativity" crap. I've been playing Ascii games for a few years and I still only see them as Ascii characters against a black background, I don't see character fighting a dragon: I see that thing in the middle of my email address fighting letters of the alphabet that happen to be named after D&D monsters while picking up punctuation marks that happen to have names like Adamantium Longsword and Dwarf Bone Armor.

Not to mention that most things can't be done in ascii, try to imagine Silent Hill in Ascii: "A dark red U? That must be my Cheryl!"

[ January 23, 2008: Message edited by: Sheogorath ]