   Would you guys like a console rendering library?
  Hi all,Firstly, despite the title sounding like I'm fishing, I'm posting in Beginners deliberately, so please don't move me to Your Announcements After a side topic on this thread, a thought occured to me.For all you guys dutifully making your first console apps in the promise that it'll help you move on to all the DirectX/OpenGL fun, it may be helpful to get experience of using some form of output API before you hit DirectX/OpenGL. I know that at first it can seem difficult to tell where "built-in" C++ ends and DirectX begins.It could well help you to understand what's going on when suddenly surrounded by a complex graphical API - ie, should help you to understand the various levels of abstraction and seperation at work. To this end, I was thinking of writing a simple rendering API for the console.Essentially, instead of doing printf("some text"); or cout << "some text"; when you want to print, you would call renderer.OutputText(lineNumber, ColumnNumber, colour, text);But, it would make it easy for you to do little windows and things too. You could have a far prettier replacement forint i;cout << "Please enter a number" << endl;cin >> i; by letting you do something more like   int i = renderer.GetInteger("Please enter a number");which would pop an ASCII red-bordered window up in the centre of the console *over* the text that's already there, with "Please enter a number" and a little input box. When the user entered a number the little ASCII window would close, and your original text still be on screen.This would give you experience of talking to a rendering layer and also hopefully make your console games look better by taking care of some formatting niceties for you.So, before I go ahead and write something, I wanted to see if anyone would like it.I should also add the disclaimer that I may have another completely wonderful idea in half an hour and completely neglect to ever implement this    Edit: HMMM - I could even build in my ASCII rendering engine to allow picture display... but that might be getting away from the whole "simple API" point.www.coldcity.comcode, pics, life[edited by - IainC on February 20, 2004 1:05:12 PM]
  Sounds like something very helpful to me. I would use it if I ever tried to make a console program again. I''d go for it! ;  That ASCII image renderer is freakin' cool! You wrote that?What are the max dimensions of the image? It seems like it could theoretically handle 160x50...very cool. [edited by - smitty1276 on February 20, 2004 2:41:02 PM];  Sign me up.  Would be great but Even better to learn from the code.   If not to much trouble, might be good to make 2 files, one for the simple stuff and another with everything.Technology can either save us or destroy us.  Me ... I say it will destroy us if Microsoft is the example.    [edited by - Xeneth on February 20, 2004 2:52:50 PM];  Cool - I'll see if I can whip something up as a side project. I'll stick something in Announcements if anything comes of it.smitty1276 - Thanks man :D Yeah, it's mine - I wrote it during the ASCII fishtank contest on the forums a while ago... But there are better techniques out there using more characters and stuff. Check out the original thread if you can find it, it was pretty cool Anyway, I forget the max size - but please feel free to play with it! Have a look at the realtime ASCII raytracer too...   [edited by - IainC on February 20, 2004 5:29:16 PM]