Ok, Jotaf's idea has just left the world of vapourware. Here is the first shot of a greyscale bitmap dynamically mapped to unused ASCII codes and printed on the console.
Right now, the portrait is a placeholder shamelessly ripped from faceyourmanga.com. As you can see, it works pretty well and we could almost think it's actually colored, but it's displayed using the same color as the text next to it (a very dark brown) and the different colors are the result of different alpha values. Of course, this only works if you use a 32 bit font, as a 24 bit font has no alpha layer and could only produce monochrome bitmaps.
Of course, now I'll have a hard time trying to convince people that this is a text-mode game...
Yeah, I know... Doryen's dwellers have a strange way to say hello...
Now, the question is... Will I be able to do decent graphics for the procedural portraits system...
