Quote Originally Posted by WILL
The whole idea of making text chars look like they're more than one pixel via some kind of ASCII trick blows my mind.

You've gotta explain this to us here one day.
Will, this is actually a visual trick. For instance, when you put gray character "#" on black background, it gives "overall look" of dark gray. Thus, you can mix characters of 15 color palette to obtain additional "fake" colors. Mapping true-color image to the generated colors using the above method is quite easy. However, when you start "drawing" stuff in text mode, you'll see how bad it looks. :?

Using a good combination of colors for 3D models is the biggest challenge (and that is why you see rings of basic colors in the demo instead of some fancy palette). In our latest ASCII mapper there are a lot of shades of basic colors, but the number of partly saturated non-pure colors is scarce (e.g. yellow + dark-green + gray) because these colors are obtained by mixing primary colors with gray colors (e.g. green -> yellow -> yellow + gray). Basic colors are not mixed between themselves.

Oh and by "mixing" I mean the following: assume you have red background and yellow character color; if you use characters like ".O8", you are getting colors which "smoothly" change from red background to yellow foreground. In our TMDC 8 demo entry Innerflux, we used only characters ".+oO8". With proper antialiasing and color mapping, these characters give a fine round look of objects. In the invitation demo, the second pass filter uses ".:=+i!tvou$395O8HRB" letters (first-pass filter uses the above simple set).

Hope this info will be useful for someone with enough courage to participate in the incoming compo.