Talk:Write language name in 3D ASCII

Criteria for non-draft

The problem with this task overall is that it has only one implementation in about 5 months of existence. While a task may have fewer than 4 implementations at the start of its life, it should normally get above that threshold rapidly (i.e., timescale: days). My concern is that this “task” (without admitting whether it is a task or not) is never going to attract any further implementations because of the way it is specified; very few languages/runtimes have a library for this sort of thing on the grounds that it's not actually very useful…

A general “write the language's name in 3D” task would be far better, since that would admit graphical implementations as well. –Donal Fellows 15:11, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

I agree. This task has been sitting around for a long time with nothing being done to it. While it is "cute" it seems that it isn't interesting enough. I think opening it up to other methods of display (built-in graphics, OpenGL, etc.) would be good. --Mwn3d 15:34, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

We could always create a separate task for graphics and opengl, if necessary.

--Markhobley 22:33, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

The task description appears complete to me. I don't think lack of popularity is a reason to keep the task as a draft. Some tasks are just more less interesting than others. If there are no issues with the task description, then I suggest that we promote this to task. --Markhobley 22:33, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Lack of popularity, to me, means that the task description hasn't really been tested much. I like to wait until there are a few different languages implementing the task from a few different users. That at least proves that several people understand and like the description. --Mwn3d 23:48, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

From my perspective, the issue is that I don't see this task as being at all relevant to anything. “3D in ASCII” (or even Unicode) is just of enormously low value. (Showing 3D text in a graphical display is of value by comparison; a number of applications do that.) It also happens to be substantially more awkward for most languages to do than the exemplar (I suspect that “Smalltalk” will have problems fitting in a standard display!) so I'm guessing that the vast majority of people are never going to be keen on implementing this task. Plus right now the only thing being demonstrated is loading and calling into a library (that other languages don't have a near-equivalent of); big deal, other tasks do that better. –Donal Fellows 10:38, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

I've been musing on-and-off on doing it as an isometric-view voxel renderer, and using a character->voxel set mapping. I doubt I'll ever get around to it, though. It's not a high priority, but has interesting possible approaches. Perhaps if the task were distilled to specifying an approach with interesting components, it would be more popular? --Michael Mol 15:49, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

A way that I have done this in the past is to just use flat coloured spaces to create the letter shapes, repeating the letter drawing algorithm one square down and one square to the right in a lighter colour. This causes a shadow effect behind the lettering, giving it a 3d appearance. A reimplementation of that would fit this task nicely. --Markhobley 16:53, 16 June 2011 (UTC)