Question

I’m working on a simple pong clone for the terminal and need a way to delay the printing of a ‘frame’.

I have a two dimensional array

screen[ROWS][COLUMNS]

and a function that prints the screen

void printScreen() {
    int i = 0;
    int j;

    while(i < ROWS) {
        j = 0;

        while(j < COLUMNS) {
            printf("%c", screen[i][j]);
            j++;
        }
        i++;
    }
}

It seems that when I do

printScreen();
usleep(1000000);
printScreen();

it will sleep the execution during printScreen().

Any tips for doing this type of animation on the terminal would be much appreciated. Maybe I’m doing this completely wrong. How is it done with ASCII movies like this?

EDIT I’m going with ncurses. Thank you both for the suggestion.

On Ubuntu sudo aptitude install libncurses5-dev and compile with -lncurses.

Answer 1

Ascii movies are done with aalib which works like a graphics display driver. Most people developing full fledged console apps and games use the curses framework or a version of it like ncurses. The one real restriction of going that route is you have to want the full ptty (you can’t take part of it).