17 Feb, 2009, boblinski wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
G'day,

What I'm trying to do is edit my greeting screen.. but I can't find what file it is I have to edit.. I've searched the src folder and can't find anything containing "THIS IS A MUD BASED ON….." (part of the current greeting).

Also, I've seen many muds with very cool pictures made from the simple characters on a standard keyboard.. does anyone have advice on making this pictures.. ie. what characters I can and can't use and what program I should make the picture in before implementing into the mud.

Thanks in advance.
17 Feb, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
Can't really help you on the artistic question, but the greeting is stored in a help file I believe. Try searching in the area directory (the help file is stored as an area, IIRC).

NOTE: I'm coming from SMAUG, but ROM probably works the same way here.
17 Feb, 2009, Davion wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
DavidHaley said:
NOTE: I'm coming from SMAUG, but ROM probably works the same way here.


*nodnod* It's in rom.are under GREETING. Just do a grep ;).

As for what you should do to make them.. ee. It's easier said than done. The only real tool you can use is notepad with monospacing :). If you want lots of examples, just google 'ascii art' and you should get a bunch of hits. One of my personal favourites is a lady by the name of Joan Stark. She's got some wicked stuff on her site.

Edit:
I actually started surfing her site shortly after making this post :P and found this tutorial on making your own ascii art!
17 Feb, 2009, Kline wrote in the 4th comment:
Votes: 0
You can also try Torchsoft ASCII Art Studio, it looks intriguing, but I've never tried it myself.

18 Feb, 2009, Skol wrote in the 5th comment:
Votes: 0
On Mac there's one called 'Email Effects', does some fun stuff. Also look for 'Figlet' or google Figlet Server. You can use that to make the words if you don't want to add dot by dot.
18 Feb, 2009, quixadhal wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
There are lots of tools out there which can help.

When I did WileyMUD's screen (many years ago!), I used "figlet" to make the larger text. It was an old program designed to print banners on the line printers (anyone old enough to remember line printers, and boxes of fanfold paper?).

There are also a fair number of ANSI art drawing tools, if you want to include colour in your login screen. For many years, I always advocated NOT doing so, since printing vt100/ANSI escape codes onto a terminal that doesn't support them usually causes a mess (at best), or can lock up the terminal or disconnect the user's session. However, every time I say something like that, people remind me that nobody uses real glass terminals anymore, and it's hard to even find a terminal emulator that won't handle basic ANSI these days.

If you want to peruse a few of them, and don't mind a rather SLOW connection, I wrote a script ages ago that fetches and stores the ANSI screens from various muds, and converts them to png (or is it jpeg)?
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