How AAUT works... On Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 10:09:56AM -0800, Joshua Brentano wrote: > Can you tell me a little about Text-Mode Unreal, and how it works with, > or doesn't work with the Text-Mode Quake project.... AAlib, etc.? OK. Broadly speaking, both use the same library [called aalib] at the far backend: http://aa-project.sf.net It's a basic graphics library like any other; you ask it to draw a line between two points, and it does - it just uses an ascii context to do it, drawing suitable characters between the two points instead of a pixellated line. This is where the difference between textmode quake & AAUT [and AAquake2] comes in: Textmode quake uses something called aavga, which is a drop-in replacement for the graphics library that quake /was/ using. It has the same function calls, etc, but uses text instead of svga. Quake, here, believes it's talking to SVGA, and aavga is transparently altering the actual output to be AA instead. AAUT uses the aalib backend on SDL. SDL [www.libsdl.org] is a general-purpose game programming library a lot like directX, but instead of doing everything itself, it asks outside libraries to do a lot of the hard work for it [eg, sound or video]. When you ask SDL to "draw a line between two points", it instead asks a suitable graphics library to do that for you. If you've told SDL to use aalib, it uses aalib. If you've told SDL to use openGL, it uses openGL. So, for AAUT, you ask UT to use the software [SDL] renderer, as opposed to using straight openGL. You then tell SDL to use the aalib backend. AAUT is just an example I use, because it's what everyone recognises; pretty much anything using SDL can be asked to render in ascii-art by just doing something like export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=aalib So, for example, to watch everyone's favorite drugged-up teenager in aalib [much the same], you could do: export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=aalib plaympeg ./ellen_feiss_m480.mpg Note that in order to actually do that, you need SDL compiled with aalib support [not very likely out of the box on redhat or similar, because not many people want it] Gary (-;