ASCII Art in Item Description

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

So… I had this crazy idea.
I added an ASCII art in to the description of the butcher knife. I separated the lines with \n
This is the result.

Craft menu:

craft
craft.png632×531 5.78 KB

Debug menu:

debug
debug.png1102×356 4.86 KB

Inventory:

works
works.png391×585 5.7 KB

10 Likes
2

Thats awesome, i always wonder what some special weapons in the game looks like

3

This kind of feature will require a convention on maximum size of the window an artist can use, so it could be displayed properly on small screens.

4

Or downscale the ASCII to match the size of the info box

5

That’s actually really cool

6

Made it smaller, it works:
works
pretttyyyyycoool
This is pretty exciting. I wonder if this could be a thing in game.

3 Likes
7

Combat knife
combat_knife
Hunting knife
hunting_knife
Pocket knife
pocket_knife

12 Likes
8

I wonder how a butter knife looks like…

9

I hope you would consider making art for food items also, especially herb and plants

1 Like
10

I think the best course of action is to add another parameter, “ascii_art”, that shows up under description.

The reason why to introduce a new variable is so that you could turn off ascii art in options, to have shorter description.

I’m sure some people might not want to see ascii art as some would want a faster scroll.

3 Likes
11

I wonder how a butter knife looks like…

butter_knife

I hope you would consider making art for food items also, especially herb and plants

Toast-em
toast-ems
Yeah, of course, but those are hard to make. Especially for a beginner like me.

I think the best course of action is to add another parameter, “ascii_art”, that shows up under description.

That’s a good idea. I can see why some people wouldn’t like to see it. However this requires some code knowledge, so this feature won’t be a thing any time soon.

6 Likes
12

Adding another field to the json is easy, but imagine how LARGE the file will become after adding all the pictures to all the items.

13

You mean very hard to scroll through or actually large in term of file size ?

14

The ascii takes up only one line of code, one very long one. The “art” is about 300 characters long.

EDIT: it’s less, the toast-em one is 179 characters large. I think that’s the largest one. The pocket knife is just 160 long.

15

Adding a few 1000 letters should only change a files size by a few kilobits, in other words very LITTLE file changr occour

16

So the tricky part would mainly be to make it display correctly on any screen size ?

17

I agree to this. Mobile devices has its limit in viewing item informations, so the ASCII arts might look terrible at that :frowning:

18

A stopgap might be to make the ASCII art toggled through the options. I’m sure either way some people might not care for it, but if it got borked on your particular screen for some reason you could at least disable it so you don’t have a paragraph of weird, disjointed characters.

19

This.
Character limit.

20

Would it be possible to dedicate a json file to it ? With a two entry system : one with item id and one with actual ASCII art .
This way it would not clutter the actual item file

1 Like