ANSImation - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

ANSImation

1. n. An ANSI artwork which is animated.

from The Artscene Dictionary

Discretionary use of screen clearing and cursor-positioning codes that the ANSI standard allows makes a laborious, painstaking species of ANSI animation (or "ANSImation") possible, facilitated by a suite of onion paper, transition and concatination tools bundled in with TheDraw. In the Public Domain era, where [blinking] and [ANSI music] were both also viable avenues of ANSI art practice to explore (sometimes simultaneously!) experimentation into ANSI animation was not wholly unusual (indeed, Videon's ANSI animations were was one of the most distinguishing elements of the celebrated BBS door game [Tradewars 2002]), but where underground ANSI art was concerned the genre peaked with JeD of ACiD and could be considered effectively extinct as of 1995.

At its most basic level, you can achieve ANSI art animation by simply having the cursor return to the top left corner after a screen is drawn with a second screen drawn on top of the first without including the "clear screen" code. If you repost an altered version of the first screen with changes, then to a viewer only the changes will be seen to move. Baking in pauses or delays is a matter of treading water by redrawing the same content over and over again (though the overall speed of the animation display will be a function of the baud rate at which the ANSI screen information is transmitted.) If you really know what you're doing, you can draw the background once and only draw changed characters on top of it, as SysOps do when drawing animated lightbars for their matrix login screens, but that degree of optimisation is a master technique.