I'm trying to make a rouguelike game that runs inside a terminal using Ruby but I'm not exactly sure how to go about doing that. I want to be able to address and update each cell in the standard 80*24 terminal window individually. Can I do this with the standard library or alternately are there any good gems I could do this with?
Curses is probably the easiest to implement and it is widely available across platforms. Ruby bindings used to come as part of the standard library, but it's now a gem: gem install curses. Here's an example from the docs:
require "curses"
def show_message(message)
height = 5
width = message.length + 6
top = (Curses.lines - height) / 2
left = (Curses.cols - width) / 2
win = Curses::Window.new(height, width, top, left)
win.box("|", "-")
win.setpos(2, 3)
win.addstr(message)
win.refresh
win.getch
win.close
end
Curses.init_screen
begin
Curses.crmode
Curses.setpos((Curses.lines - 1) / 2, (Curses.cols - 11) / 2)
Curses.addstr("Hit any key")
Curses.refresh
Curses.getch
show_message("Hello, World!")
ensure
Curses.close_screen
end