In this video Linus demos Temple OS
At the [7 minute mark](https://youtu.be/LtlyeDAJR7A?t=424) it is explained that the graphics are in text mode. Is this impressive?
In the comments section someone writes
>People who play one of Terry’s games: “Ehh…”
>People who find out he made the OS it runs on: “Very impressive.”
>People who find out that his animated, 3D games are literally a Textfile: HOLY SHIT
And if you read the replies, there’s an argument about whether this is impressive or not. Is it impressive? why or why not?
In: Technology
As a programmer, not really. It’s all kinds of weird and quirky, but it’s not really technically challenging.
3D graphics is just a bunch of data. There’s no reason why you can’t encode 3D graphics in a text format, and in fact we do. For instance the STL format often used in 3D printing has a text representation that looks like:
solid model
facet normal 0.0 0.0 -1.0
outer loop
vertex 20.0 0.0 0.0
vertex 0.0 -20.0 0.0
vertex 0.0 0.0 0.0
endloop
endfacet
…
We can also do with images. The PNM format is obscure these days, but you can find the rare use in Linux systems. Looks like this:
P1
# This is an example bitmap of the letter “J”
6 10
0 0 0 0 1 0
0 0 0 0 1 0
0 0 0 0 1 0
0 0 0 0 1 0
0 0 0 0 1 0
0 0 0 0 1 0
1 0 0 0 1 0
0 1 1 1 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0
If you save that as “j.pnm”, you should be able to view it in a program that can read the format.
It’s just long and verbose, but other than that there’s nothing difficult about expressing 3D data in text. And sure, you can combine different kinds of data in one file, and have markup indicating what part is what. HTML is an example of that kind of thing.
In the end, data is data. It can be stored and transmitted in any conceivable manner: as dots on a piece of paper, as words, engraved into stone, sent into the air as smoke signals… it’s just a matter of what method works best for a given application.
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