The Tavern

Okay, I am bad at reading (or guessing) the ASCII view. I mean, I get the general idea of where walls are and where the crowd is, but I don't usually completely understand how to figure out which is the player and which character is what monster or other dungeon feature, so the positioning content looks like gibberish the more crowded it gets.

This led me to wonder: Has any conversion software been released that could translate from a given ASCII view to a picture in Tiles mode? I'd love to be able to copy some of these ASCII captures into the browser and see exactly what you guys are talking about more clearly. Or, would this be feasible/difficult?

It'd be possible, not very interesting,, and not insignificantly difficult. Convincing someone knowledgeable to do so would be a challenge, if you have the chops and the interest, I'm sure it'd be well enough received.

Console really doesn't take that much time to adjust to. FWIW the player is always "@" monsters are letters (and & or numbers for demons) a black and white copy paste misses some of the detail (different critters for the same letter are distinguished by color, all orcs are 'o', but regular, mages, priests, warriors etc. are all different colors)

You couldn't perform this conversion with 100% accuracy, since some colours in console mode are made up of random switching between a small set of colours (the same way some tiles have a few variations which randomly cycle). The good news is, a little practice will get you reading console games without much issue. Once you start to recognise what each monster letter grouping is for (eg 'd' for base draconians, 'q' for nonbase) you will have an easier time.

You're also banking on the console player not using any glyph substitutions. Many console players will have walls, monsters, etc. use unusual characters (or colours). For that reason alone I'd say an automatic converter is doomed to fail on many ttyrecs. I'd suggest instead giving Crawl its own recording system, producing replays that can be played back in console or tiles - still a lot of work but I'm sure it's less awkward than converting a ttyrec to an intelligible tiles replay.

If you play one Crawl game in console and make it to like, Lair, you'll probably be able to parse console perfectly well after that.

I recently switched to console across all the roguelikes I play where it is an option after being a diehard tiles player my whole roguelike life. It all started with playing and losing several games of Nethack on NAO, and now for some reason I just can't kick it. Who knew.

You pick it up quick is my point.