This software is a library on top of the NCurses library for ease of rendering ASCII graphics adding features like scrolling, sprites, collision detection and vector graphics.

Installation

To use this library, the NCurses development library needs to be installed as a dependency.

On Ubuntu for example, we install the following package: libncurses5-dev

To install the above package (plus GCC and CMake), we open a terminal window and type the following command line:

sudo apt-get install g++ cmake libncurses5-dev

Optionally, the SDL library may be installed to provide sound playback and joystick support via the SDL packages libsdl1.2-dev and libsdl-mixer1.2-dev or the SDL2 packages libsdl2-dev and libsdl2-mixer-dev.

So to install SDL for sound and joystick support, we type:

sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev joystick

On other Linux distributions the procedure is very similar - just the package installer and the package names usually differ.

Compilation

A simple demo application is available in the source file main.cpp. The demo application can be compiled and started on the command line as follows:

cmake . && make && ./main

This serves as a starting point for developing your own NCurses based applications. It mainly demonstrates how to initialize the library, use its built-in 5x3 grid font and cleanup things afterwards.

Demos

The demos in the examples directory are mainly intended to be just copied over main.cpp in the parent directory. All examples can be compiled at once with cmake in the examples directory.

Programming API

The software consists of the following modules:

gfx.h/.cpp: basic graphics like sprite rendering and line drawing
scrollarea.h/.cpp: shows a scrollable window as a section of a larger canvas area
gridfont.h/.cpp: ASCII font made up of grid characters with 5x3 columns resp. rows
gridarea.h/.cpp: shows a scrollable grid area made up of 5x3 grid characters
gridmenu.h/.cpp: shows a simple overlay menu made up of grid characters
polygon.h/.cpp: render a polygon into the canvas area
sound.h/.cpp: sound playback for WAV files
joystick.h/.cpp: joystick input handling
mouse.h/.cpp: mouse input handling
util.h/.cpp: utility functions
main.cpp: demo application

Documentation

You can use Doxygen to generate a html documentation of the API and its contained functions:

doxygen

Then simply open the generated index.html file in docs/html.

Happy ASCII coding! Stefan