The text should only be modified outside the scrolling region, which is defined with \e
The text should only be modified outside the scrolling region, which is defined with \e[..r. So whenever a line is entered inside the scrolling region you log it, if not you don't.

I've played it (or its variants) a little bit; that doesn't mean I particularly like looking at the screen, though. :wink:


One of my favorite games growing up was Castle of the Winds, a graphical rendition of this genre.

I'm a little surprised at the nethack comments. I expected some objections about it being ugly or not appropriate to muds or some such, but I didn't figure anyone would have any trouble deducing what was represented. I suspect with it being in motion, anyone should be able to figure out what is going on, and I'm fairly doubtful that people will play it, so I looked for some youtube videos and I managed to find one that moved faster than a pace of one action every 10 days, but it's blurry and horrible. Try the HQ version, it's blurry too. (I forget how to link to hq)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzu0i7KB8...

The only other videos I found used a different set of symbols that make it much easier to work out what is going on, so I picked this one to see if people still had trouble visualizing surroundings from it.

If I were to implement something like this, I'd have a configurable legend display with it (as I mentioned before) since learning what the symbols meant is the only real problem I had in learning the basic ideas of the game. I think I prefer the angband display, personally, but its gameplay isn't particularly interesting to me.

The video you linked is much easier to discern than the text you pasted before, but it still takes some time if you're not used to NetHack to be able to tell the difference betweeen two given characters. I believe the video showed an F standing for a lichen, while an f stood for a kitten?

I thought that might be the case, I'm sure lack of color didn't help.

Nethack groups creatures by type. F is fungus, a green F is lichen. f is feline. A white f is a kitten/cat. Learning wtf the individual symbols mean is the largest issue that I see with using a roguelike display for a mud. In nethack (which is turnbased), you just use the "whatis" command (/) and highlight something to see what it is. That's not really an option in a realtime game. I am vaguely confident a map legend would help with this, although nethack still has one other thing that irks me. Namely, if you have two white "d"s adjacent to you, one is your dog and the other is a dog that would very much like to kill you. I doubt it'd be difficult to mark friendlies from foes, but it still annoys me a bit that you can't easily distinguish between individual creatures. On a normal top-down game, like, say, Link to the Past, you can differentiate them by tracking their movement, but that is much more difficult in a system with such blocky movement.

This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about that could be more easily solved with proper graphics. Even if you said that all white "d" symbols represent dogs, you can use a subtle background hue of (for example) green or red to mark friendlies and foes. Now, this still doesn't let you distinguish "nice friendly dogs" from "evil, snarly dogs" by the symbol alone, but my point is that a simple graphics layer lets you do so much more than you can with just symbols and symbol colors – even if you're not doing anything particularly fancy.

Actually, my main issue was that it looked like an amorphous blob of lines. Color probably wouldn't have made much difference.

A good example of a game made of 'graphical text' that I enjoyed is Snipes, which I once attempted to clone as a side project. It's more graphical than textual, for sure, but in a good way.

Incidentally, that's how I was planning on distinguishing them with an ascii display: background color

Green for friendlies, red for hostiles.

If you want something HARD to play, try Dwarf Fortre....

It's a real-time strategy game using text graphics and an extended font. Thankfully, you can pause it. I linked part 9 of the tutorial video series, just because it shows some of the complexity. :)

I was a fan.