Framework	Core	Controls	GameHelpers	Ansi
MonoGame DX
SFML
MonoGame GL

SadConsole is an MonoGame 3.5-based game library (using .NET 4.6) that provides an engine to emulate old-school console and command prompt style graphics. One or more textures are used to represent the standard ascii character set. SadConsole allows you to create console instances which can be managed independently of each other. A console is made up of individual cells which can have a foreground, background, character, and a special effect applied to it.

SadConsole targets Windows and Linux using MonoGame 3.5 or SFML.

There is source code for a screen editor written in SadConsole. It's the most comprehensive project to date using SadConsole and is available at https://github.com/Thraka/SadConsoleEditor/

Some sample games are provided in the SampleGames folder and are now part of the Visual Studio solution file.

• Features
• Demo video

Here are some of the features SadConsole supports.

• Show any number of consoles
• Uses PNG graphic fonts supporting more than 256 characters
• Multiple fonts in your game
• Draggable console windows within the game
• Text GUI controls
• Full keyboard support
• Full mouse support
• Read ansi files from the good old DOS days
• Animation engine
• Instruction engine

http://youtu.be/ZukjZIqDfJw

SadConsole uses NuGet for its .NET dependencies, but requires some external dependencies on MacOS and Linux.

As a MonoMac project, Xcode must be installed along with the full Xamarin development kit and you'll want to use the SadConsole OpenGL library instead of the default DirectX library.

SadConsole for Linux should work with no problems. If you compile for Mono and use the SadConsole OpenGL library (instead of the default DirectX library) then everything should just work. I've only tested this on Ubuntu.

StarterProject demonstrates how to use SadConsole in a multi-platform environment.

If you're migrating an existing 2.0 project to 3.0 here are some things to remember.

1. If you're using the SadConsole.Consoles.Console type, the structure has changed a bit.

   1. You do not need to access the CellData or _cellData variables to manipulate the surface. Do a find/replace with an empty string.
   2. Anything related to Character was changed to Glyph. For example SetCharacter is now SetGlyph and CharacterIndex is GlyphIndex.
   3. If you accessed the CellData[indexor] directly, use textSurface[indexor].

2. The SadConsole.Entities namespace has been removed.

   1. There is no longer a specific entity type.
   2. The animation portion of an entity has moved to the SadConsole.Consoles.AnimatedTextSurface type.
      • You can render animations as the surface of any console because of this
   3. The GameHelpers library has a SadConsole.Game.GameObject type that acts like the old entity type.
      • This type though is not part of the console system like entity was and is part of the GameHelpers library now.

3. Initialization is simpler. Use this line now. No need to load a font or resize manually, it's all handled for you

   var rootConsole = SadConsole.Engine.Initialize(_graphics, "IBM.font", 80, 25);

   If you're using the game component, it has changed too:

   var sadConsoleComponent = new SadConsole.EngineGameComponent(this, graphics, "IBM.font", 80, 60, () =>
   {
   	// ... do init stuff, no need to resize or load the font.
   });
   
   Components.Add(sadConsoleComponent);

   Also not that Engine.Initialize will return a console to the specified screen size (in this case 80x25) and automatically adds it to the SadConsole.Engine.ConsoleRenderStack.

There is currently no license associated with SadConsole. No one assumes any responsibility Code taken from MonoGame remain under the MonoGame license: Microsoft Public License.