I'm planning to include a set of special commemorative intro ANSIs with the 25th anniversary release. I wanted to do larger format ANSIs like I've seen over the years from ANSI art sites. These ANSIs are 80x120, which means they can't be viewed entirely on a standard 80x25 screen. To view them, you'll have to scroll back, or else increase the number of visible lines in order to see the entire image at once.

If you'd like to take a look at the proposed new ANSIs, you can display them from the intro menu with the ? command. There are 7 images, so press ? multiple times to see them all. You'll find them at twgs.classictw.com.

I'd like to hear any feedback on the ANSIs. Do you like them, not like them, or are indifferent? Is it clear what you're looking at? The theme of these ANSIs is Alien Traders. These are all aliens who populate the TradeWars universe. In order, the aliens are Kvertoo, Inanni, Mul Temb, Taurean, T'Khasi, Antarian, and Seeschlange. I considered labeling them, but decided against it to avoid cluttering the already busy images. Would it be better to include a label or caption so people have some idea what they're looking at here?

After I get some feedback on these, I might post captures of them here so more people can see them and give me feedback. But initially I wanted to get feedback on the ANSIs as they'll be shown in the game, which I'm afraid might be a nuisance because of their size.

I've been looking at these ANSIs with a variety of fonts, and with most of them, they look fine. There are differences in how the characters look, but the general appearance of the ANSI is the same, with the right relative lightness and darkness of characters. But with one font, some character shades appear reversed, making some of the images look illegible. I think it's just a reality of ANSI art that you can't control exactly how an image will display with a particular font. The question is whether the majority of fonts will display the images as intended. I'm curious if the images appear clean or garbled to most of you who view it, and what font and/or terminal you're using if they look garbled.

A few of the images look fine with all fonts, so it may be that I can only use those that stand up well regardless of font.

Did you mean for them to be viewed vertically?

I cannot make out what the ansi images are. All I recognize are the words TradeWars and 25th Anniversary.

The most I can view at 1680x1050 resolution and the lowest font size putty will display (8pt) is 70 lines, which does make it a bit hard to tell what I am looking at. I can easily go much wider though.

If you tweak ZOC just right, it looks pretty good. However, with Foreground set to White, it doesn't look quite right. Setting the Foreground color to Gray looks good though. Also, ZOC mutes colors in the scrollback area. I'm only able to get 77 rows on screen though.

The Windows 7 telnet client butchers ANSI graphics.

I wrote a console app a few years back specifically for TradeWars ANSIs, and it looks good, as does SWATH. However, both of these apps fail to display the "25th ANNIVERSARY" label that you are adding at the end. Perhaps Stein and I didn't implement the Esc codes you're using correctly (or at all).

I'm attaching a screen shot of my app, SWATH, and ZOC side by side. Note the scrollback muting in ZOC starting below the left eye, which actually helps since it mutes the White to more of a Gray.

Yeah, in the years after TW came out, ANSI art really evolved into an art form of its own. I love some of the art I've seen over the years. They all tend to be larger format, mostly vertical, using the four block characters for shading and achieving a wider color palette. Here's a gallery showing the kind of art I'm talking about.

http://www.roysac.com/otheransi.asp

But these kinds of images tend not to be as suitable for direct telnet viewing as for display in online galleries. And maybe that's what I should do here. I wanted to create a set of ANSIs because that art style is appropriate for this game, but they don't necessarily need to be shown directly in-game. I can showcase them as part of TWGS itself, and on the website, if the ANSI display quality is going to be spotty. I've definitely seen some displays of these where I can't make out the images at all, as Cruncher is seeing. On standard telnet under Vista, which is what I used to create the art, it looks just like I intended it to look.

EP, that image you showed is actually one of the images that tends to look good on all fonts I've viewed it under. Some of the others, with more grays, have a wider range of quality. Did you get them to show as well under the three views you tried?

Micro, I fixed a bug in how that 25th anniversary tag is showing. It's now using the same control codes that are used elsewhere, like in the full-screen TriCron, so hopefully that'll work better. I haven't uploaded that fix yet, but will in a bit.

Ok, I posted the new update that I hope will fix the display of the 25th anniversary tag line. Elder, if you could test that and let me know, that'd be great.

Thanks!

The images are much clearer in Swath, but the 25th Anniversary line isn't coming accross.

Images are still pretty raw in Zoc, and the 25th Anniversay line is visable.

Yeh, zoc mangles the heck out of them. Doesn't help that I can't set
my helper to that many rows.

Edit: Putty and linux telnet both also mangle the ansi too. Windows
telnet looks okay, altho it's a bit stretched. It looks like an image was
converted to ansi. If that's the case, it helps to "squish" the image
vertically a little before converting it to make it look less stretched
after conversion.

It's just a reality that any time you create an ANSI, it's going to be targeted to a particular font size/ratio. I did these for 8x12. So depending what you're viewing in, it'll be either squashed or stretched. That's why ANSIs today are typically captured in their optimal view and shown as images on the ANSI art sites. I guess I may have to do that. I was hopeful that they'd look "as designed" in a majority of cases, since I designed them for standard "out of the box" Windows Terminal font, but it doesn't sound like it.

Also, I'm not sure why the 25th anniversary line isn't working right. I didn't think I was doing anything that isn't done in other parts of the game.

If there's one image, maybe the Antarian (the one Elder showed above) that looks reasonably good on most clients, then maybe I could include that as a new intro ANSI, then include the rest directly from within TWGS and on the website where I can control how they're viewed. I wanted to have at least one in-game ANSI that's special for this release if possible.

This doesn't seem right, Micro. 1050/70 is 15 pixel height characters (not accounting for window borders, etc). 9 point font is 12 pixel height characters, and I can show about 90% of the image, plenty, on my 1680x1050 display. In fact, that's what I've been using to create and test these. I just displayed them on Putty and I thought they looked very close to "as designed", and I could view nearly the entire image. Using Terminal font, translation set to "Font Encoding", and 10 pt font.

With the stated settings, on my 1680x1050 display, here's what I see when I view the first ANSI:

I was viewing with courier font. It looks much better with terminal font, but your still only getting 80 lines at 10pt. I dropped down to 8pt and was able to see the full image:

The 25th ANNIVERSARY label still doesn't show up for me. To begin the label, I find where you send ESC[17A+ESC[1m+ESC[47m, and then every char is followed by #8, which is BackSpace. Why do you have #8 chars in there? I believe it would display correctly with out them.

I'm going to pull that banner for simplicity, so this is just academic. But basically, the backspace is needed because I'm doing a special sequence to write a block of 5 characters vertical, then moving across left to right. So I write a character, newline, backspace, write another character below the first, etc, then jump back up to the next vertical line and repeat.

You said that it's following every character by #8. It should be followed by #10#8. Wonder if the #10 is being stripped out? Some clients do this because #13 and #10 are nearly always paired. Sometimes #13 is interpreted as both #13 and #10, which is isn't. #13 carriage return takes you back to the front of the line, and #10 linefeed drops you down without moving you to the front of the line. Both are needed to do a "return" at the end of a line. What I'm doing is down one, left one. A good test of this theory would be to use the ANSI cursor down sequence rather than #10, and the ANSI cursor left sequence rather than #8. I used #10 and #8 to decrease characters sent, but I bet the ANSI sequences are more likely to be processed correctly. Maybe I'll try that before I pull this entirely, though I still may just pull it. Always good to understand a bug one way or the other.

Thanks JP. I'm confident the ANSI sequences will work better. You are correct that the problem is how we're handling #10.