ASCII Animator: GuideThe BasicsASCII Animator is a modified version of ASCII Paint. Like MS Paint, the drawing system works on a pixel by pixel system. However, it differs in a few aspects:
1) You're not limited to just normal pixels. You can use ASCII characters, which allows you to add an extra point of detail into the drawing.
2) Since you can use ASCII Characters, it allows you to define foreground and background colors. Foreground color defines the character color, while the background the background pixel.
3) Last of all, you can export the image into different types of images, for example .gif, .bmp, .png, etc.
When you start up the program, it should look something like this:
(1) ASCII characters. Click on one to choose it. The arrows and highlighted row will move accordingly.
(2) Colors. Right click to set background, left click to select foreground. If the two colors are the same an X will appear over the color.
(2a) Palette selector. Click the arrow to scroll through the available palettes.
(3) Draw Tools. Pretty much exactly as Paint except for two options:
(3a) Copy - This provides a selector which you drag over the area you want to copy. After a copy the pixel image will become a single pixel again.
(3b) Paste - After selecting something to copy, select Paste to be able to paste your copied section.
Note - Try it out in the interface itself and you'll understand.
(4) Draw Options
(4a) Pick - Select a pixel's colors and characters
(4b) Undo and Redo - Straightforward, undos the last command or what you just pasted.
Note - You can ignore the options "menu" underneath this section for now. It comes into play when exporting files, however.
(5) File - Options on what to do with the currently opened file. Straightforward, except for the following options:
(5a) Save - This saves the file to the animator folder as a special ASCII Paint/Animator file.
(5b) Open - This checks for a ASCII Paint/Animator file by that name in the ASCII Animator folder.
(5a) Export - Changes the option menu to show export options
(6) Info - General info, such as where your cursor is relative to origin (top left corner) and FPS, and workspace size.
(7) Your Workspace - Moving your cursor here displays the pixel/paste image currently selected. Left click to place.
tl;dr: important basics covering the interface. go back and read it.
AnimatingThe fun part begins!
SetupBefore you can get animating you'll have to understand some parts of the workspace.
(1) Workspace Corners - Show the workspace edges
(2) Marker dots - Periodically appearing dots that denote specific pixel distances (default is ten by ten, ie one dot appears every ten pixels in any one direction)
By default, when taking the base pictures the .gif, they will conform to the marker dot distances. You can edit these distances in the ascii-paint setup file, along with the window size.
Time to draw!Here's a demo image of what a fully-equipped workspace with all the images completed looks.
Note the fact that the images are taken from left to right, top to bottom. This results in the following image when created using the default .gif properties:
Note that it takes EVERY image, including the last box.
Customizing the .gifWhen exporting to the .gif format, this mini window will appear:
Pretty simple to understand. However, there's an annoying thing that the animator does when you try to save it (at least for me).
For some reason, special ASCII characters get in the final file name. Just deleting them and leaving the automatic .gif file extension will still result in an unexported file. In order to get it to save correctly you must delete
everything in the box and typing in the name, then the extension manually.
If we tweak the settings a bit...
...we get a image like this:
note that the blackout "image" is not included since the frame count has been reduced to three. Also the delay before cycling to the next image has been reduced, resulting in a much faster ocillating image.
Hoped you guys learned a lot from that. To make your .gif postable without attaching it, upload it to tinypic (imageshack doesn't store .gifs right for some reason).
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