aalib-ruby

AAlib-Ruby brings graphics to the text terminal. AAlib-Ruby provides both a graphics context rendered as ascii-art and keyboard and mouse input. AAlib-Ruby supports a number of text-only display drivers such as Curses, SLang, and X11.

This is a DL based wrapper around the AA-lib C library. C struct alignment issues may cause problems on certain platforms when accessing variables of some objects.

Author:: Patrick Mahoney (mailto:[e-mail]) Copyright:: Copyright (c) 2007 Patrick Mahoney License:: Distributes under the same terms as Ruby

== Usage

First, AA-lib must be initialized with AAlib.init or AAlib.autoinit, returning an AAlib::Context. Two buffers are maintained: the image buffer and the text buffer. AAlib::Context#putpixel is the primary method to draw on the image buffer. AAlib::Context#render converts the image buffer to text, writing the result to the text buffer. Text may be written directly to the text buffer using AAlib::Context#puts and similar. Note that text written this way may be overwritten after a call to AAlib::Context#render. Finally, AAlib::Context#flush writes the text buffer to the screen.

=== Example

require 'aalib'

hp = AAlib::HardwareParams.new rp = AAlib::RenderParams.new

AAlib.parseoptions(hp, rp) or abort AAlib.help aa = AAlib.autoinit(hp) or abort "failed to initialize AA-lib" begin aa.autoinitkbd # set up keyboard support

# Fill screen with diagonal gradient
width = aa.imgwidth
height = aa.imgheight
height.times do |y|
  width.times do |x|
    aa.putpixel(x, y, 127*(x.to_f/width) + 127*(y.to_f/height))
  end
end

rp.randomval = 25
aa.render(rp)

msg = ' AA-lib: the ascii-art library '
blank = ' ' * msg.size
attr = AAlib::Attr::BOLD
col = (aa.scrwidth - msg.size)/2
row = aa.scrheight/2
aa.puts(col, row - 1, attr, blank)
aa.puts(col, row, attr, msg)
aa.puts(col, row + 1, attr, blank)
aa.flush

aa.getkey  # wait for any key to exit

ensure aa.close end