I have a simple game which you can play over telnet, but it refreshes the screen by printing a few line breaks and then sending the entire screen again. Sometimes this can cause flicker, and if the user scrolls up their terminal they see all the old frames.
What improvements could I make?
Is there a way to just modify certain characters rather than re-sending everything? This would probably prevent the flicker, and stop the users terminal from filling up with loads of old frames.
I tried sending the backspace character (8), but this doesn’t go any further than the start of the current line. Something like this which goes to other lines would be perfect!
Also, I noticed that telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl doesn’t use my horrible frame-sending method.. so I know there is a better solution.
Apparently I can use ANSI escape sequences.. seems to work okay on my terminal.
It’s probably a horrible unsupported thing to do, but it answers the question so I’ll leave the link here for anyone who may need it in the future.
http://www.termsys.demon.co.uk/vtansi.htm