Josh, I looked through your graphics demos in X and they're really interesting. I don't think I've seen paralax being used in ANSI animations before, but then I've not seen a lot of ANSI animations. The user controlled sprite animations were not something I expected. I guess somewhere in the back of your mind you want to make a platformer as a BBS door game. I will say it wasn't ergonomic to redraw the map as I moved teh character. Better the maps be static and just move the character around, then load a new map if the player moves to the edge of the map.

Are you still exploring ANSI graphics?

Re: Your graphics demos are really cool
By: Hebrix to All on Sun May 31 2026 02:14 am

Josh, I looked through your graphics demos in X and they're really interesting. I don't think I've seen paralax being used in ANSI animations before, but then I've not seen a lot of ANSI animations. The user controlled sprite animations were not something I expected. I guess somewhere in the back of your mind you want to make a platformer as a BBS door game. I will say it wasn't ergonomic to redraw the map as I moved teh character. Better the maps be static and just move the character around, then load a new map if the player moves to the edge of the map.

Thanks for taking a look at the demos. Yes, those experiments span about 12 years, and as far as I know, I'm the only one to try parallax ANSI animations. The stories behind all these experiments can be found in blog posts here:
https://breakintochat.com/blog/category/bbs/ansi-experiments/

As far as the map, I presume you're talking about the "Jewel 7" 80x24 map. But I am not sure exactly what you mean by "ergonomic" in that context. Do you just
mean the animations and redrawing were slow?

Regardless, yes, a static map is easier to implement and faster. But the purpose of these experiments was to try to push ANSI art on a BBS further than it had been taken before, and see how well it might work.

I find the latest version of the tile map to be pretty responsive, but of course other folks' mileage will vary. Latency is a factor. And if your terminal is configured at a larger size than the BBS standard of 80x25, then the map will probably be quite slow.

You can learn more about how the map works here: https://breakintochat.com/blog/2024/03/12/revisiting-my-ansi-tile-map/

--Josh

////--------------------------------------------------
BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog

Re: Your graphics demos are really cool
By: Kirkman to Hebrix on Sun May 31 2026 04:01 pm

Thanks for the links. I will check them out.

And, yes, I was accessing the 'game' via a full screen terminal. Limiting it to 80x25 would probably solve my "problem" of map redraw slowness.

I visited futureland.today for the first time and encountered its icon-based menus. It's nice to see some innovation in the BBS space.

-Hx