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REXPaint: Powerful, User-Friendly ASCII Art Editor

gridsagegames.com

11–20 of 27 posts

Re: REXPaint: Powerful, User-Friendly ASCII Art Editor

#11
It's about time we had terminal emulators that took font/size commands the same way they understand colour changes. There's nothing (today) stopping us from making terminals that support outputting a font-code before dumping out some art like this produces, then setting it back afterward.. Suddenly TUIs could make use of tools like this ..

Re: REXPaint: Powerful, User-Friendly ASCII Art Editor

#12

Like the ever popular and powerful Pablodraw[0], this is a .Net application. I tried a few CLI ANSI and ASCII editors on Linux recently, and it was not a great experience. Most are fairly inscrutable with limited documentation, and at least on my OS, some were just plain broken. Ah, bitrot. [0] http://picoe.ca/products/pablodraw/

I fixed a networking bug in PabloDraw about 7 years ago and recall encountering only Visual C++. Are you sure PD is a .NET app? Or is my definition of .NET wrong?

It depends on .NET 4 (or Mono [1]) and is built on Eto.Forms [2], so it most definitely is a .NET application, and more than likely is written in C#.

[1] https://www.mono-project.com/

[2] https://github.com/picoe/Eto

Re: REXPaint: Powerful, User-Friendly ASCII Art Editor

#13

Like the ever popular and powerful Pablodraw[0], this is a .Net application. I tried a few CLI ANSI and ASCII editors on Linux recently, and it was not a great experience. Most are fairly inscrutable with limited documentation, and at least on my OS, some were just plain broken. Ah, bitrot. [0] http://picoe.ca/products/pablodraw/

REXPaint is not based on .Net, and works flawlessly under Wine on Linux. Although there's no native build, there are a bunch of users on both Linux and OSX (especially since a sizeable portion of the roguelike dev community uses non-Windows platforms).

REXPaint also comes with a lengthy manual covering all of its features in detail: https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/manual.txt

Re: REXPaint: Powerful, User-Friendly ASCII Art Editor

#14
post #4

Anything that would preclude one from making a similarly-robust HTML5 (Canvas2D) ASCII editor? Font rendering wouldn't even be required. Static bitmap sprite data in a predefined grid cell layout would suffice. With fore and background color altered via fast pixel manipulation using pre-allocated array buffers. Memory usage, on large canvas areas, might be the only prohibitive issue ;) I use the wonderful Piskel 2D s…

Here's a Canvas2D-based viewer for REXPaint files:

http://jjclark1982.github.io/rex-viewer/

Adding an editing interface is left as an exercise for the reader.

Re: REXPaint: Powerful, User-Friendly ASCII Art Editor

#15
post #6

REXPaint is a great tool, and the only reason I know it exists is from playing the game it was used heavily for, Cogmind. It's a great roguelike game, and if you enjoy them I would suggest you give it a try. The dev is active in the Roguelike Discord server as well. Any interaction I've had with them has always been positive and kind. Cogmind was great to see grow into what it is today.

He's a proper bro. He also posts regularly on reddit with tips on making roguelikes, and posts cool things on Twitter.

Re: REXPaint: Powerful, User-Friendly ASCII Art Editor

#18
post #4

Anything that would preclude one from making a similarly-robust HTML5 (Canvas2D) ASCII editor? Font rendering wouldn't even be required. Static bitmap sprite data in a predefined grid cell layout would suffice. With fore and background color altered via fast pixel manipulation using pre-allocated array buffers. Memory usage, on large canvas areas, might be the only prohibitive issue ;) I use the wonderful Piskel 2D s…

As a matter of fact, there's already one out there!

I've been contributing some code. It's called glyphdrawing.club and is a lot of fun. No colors yet, but they are coming next.

Check it out:

https://glyphdrawing.club/

https://github.com/hlotvonen/glyph-drawing-club

Re: REXPaint: Powerful, User-Friendly ASCII Art Editor

#19
post #17

you can still download ACiDDraw here - http://www.acid.org/apps/apps.html

Ah. That reminds me, I used to use TheDraw on DOS back in the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw

I have a WIP renderer for the TDF font format for UNIX that I'm working on, which can output the fonts in CP437 or UTF-8 format on the terminal, or with the help of another tool, to a PNG.

Example output:

https://i.imgur.com/bkwSCEU.png

That looks like a 4 at the end, but it's a 9. A lot of the TDF fonts are a bit crazy.

Better image showing the different colored versions that are stored inside some TDF's:

https://i.imgur.com/6cyjZGi.png

Another example rendered to terminal rather than PNG using Unicode:

https://i.imgur.com/L45U347.png

Although for some bizarre reason, gnome screenshot tool completed changed the colors around.

Re: REXPaint: Powerful, User-Friendly ASCII Art Editor

#20
post #6

REXPaint is a great tool, and the only reason I know it exists is from playing the game it was used heavily for, Cogmind. It's a great roguelike game, and if you enjoy them I would suggest you give it a try. The dev is active in the Roguelike Discord server as well. Any interaction I've had with them has always been positive and kind. Cogmind was great to see grow into what it is today.

I would have said that "gorgeous ASCII particle effects" was an oxymoron, before I saw Cogmind. https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2014/03/particle-effects/
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