In highschool I made what I thought was a shit-tier space invaders out of printing to console one character at a time.
Rather than keep a frame buffer of characaters, I was scanning and modifying specific "pixel" characters as needed for performance like game of life but home-brew for my character-based space invader type enemies.
The game had a major memory leak by the time I got to presenting but that served as a perfect timer for the next player to get a turn. We didn't demo any other games once we got to it.
After class, I was not happy how many times it crashed but somebody corrected me - it was the only actual video game anyone made. Most were card games or guessing games.
Lost the source code because my floppy disk somehow got corrupted on the way home from the last day of school.
Re:Pixel Shaders in Windows Terminal
by CryptoGhost on Friday January 29, 2021 @08:31PM
(#25965101)
In my studies in college we did not do anything with the Windows API (or any other OS for that matter). While I can appreciate the concept of basically just using standard libraries to teach CS fundamentals in theory, in practice it just means the only things available to you are mostly leetcode-esque academic coding. Would have loved an assignment like this in my 1st or 2nd year. I was probably not aware of stuff like curses libraries until my senior year if that.
javidx9 has a series of videos on their home-grown console game engine, with the same "logical conclusion": https://youtu.be/xW8skO7MFYw
I can really recommend his videos!
We had a similar project, except the professor supplied a cpp file for drawing characters to X,Y coordinates. The refresh rate was atrocious, which forced us to get creative. It was odd but fun.
I wrote something similar for a college software engineering class project - we were supposed to implement image filtering (blur, zoom and the like) and I wanted to be able to display the before/after pictures in the terminal.
Source: https://github.com/donfreiday/graffiti
If you want to see some really cool and modern advances for this sort of task, check out the Ink cli framework: https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink#readme
Re:Pixel Shaders in Windows Terminal
by r3trohack3r on Friday January 29, 2021 @10:43PM
(#25965797)
Did this happen to be Digipen?
Re:Pixel Shaders in Windows Terminal
by tinyManCan on Saturday January 30, 2021 @01:20AM
(#25966735)
I had that exact same thought. Thinking back to abusing the hell out of the Windows NT console in Redmond back in 1999/2000.
Re:Pixel Shaders in Windows Terminal
by DubiousPusher on Saturday January 30, 2021 @12:20PM
(#25970871)
Haha, it sure was.
Re:Pixel Shaders in Windows Terminal
by r3trohack3r on Saturday January 30, 2021 @05:15PM
(#25973525)
I was in a campus tour group the following semester and got to see a demo!
Still keep a windows VM around to play Synaesthete.
Not having much love for text adventures, some of us got clever and figured out how to take over the buffer and draw characters. So, we made games with ascii heros, traps and enemies etc.
But one group took this to another level. They found the function to reduce the font size. They decreased it down to where it was about the size of a pixel or near enough. Then implemented a full CPU based renderer with perspective correct texture mapping and shaders.