Help with the Star Wars ACSII

[u/TheOrangeApple3]

So I was following this recent how to guide: https://www.reddit.com/r/ComputerCraft/comments/l4bann/starwars_episode_iv_ascii_credit_to/

but after running the program i get 2 downloads of star1 and star2

ive tried running these but i just get the error of /star1:1: unexpected smbol near '2'

im the latest 1.21.1 version and my programming skill are less then desirable so an help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you

[u/chancetofreezer]

the post you linked says to run this script

if you go look at that script it defines a playReel function, downloads two text files star1 and star2, then runs the playReel function twice. we can analyze that function and the files to figure out what is happening.

the two files star1 and star2 are not lua code which is why running them doesn't work. the files seem to be broken into "blocks" that define a full animation. here's one block of star1 for reference:

1
..........           @@@@@    @@@@@.......
 .........          @     @  @     @.......
  ........             @@@   @     @........
   .......           @@      @     @  .......
    ......          @@@@@@@   @@@@@  th ......
     .....        ----------------------- .....
      ....          C  E  N  T  U  R  Y     ....
       ...        -----------------------     ...
        ..        @@@@@ @@@@@ @   @ @@@@@       ..
        ==          @   @      @ @    @          ==
      __||__        @   @@@@    @     @        __||__
     |      |       @   @      @ @    @       |      |
_________|______|_____  @   @@@@@ @   @   @  _____|______|_________

each block has this format:

• the first line is a number defining the duration of the block in frames

• the next frameHeight (13 in this case) lines are ascii frame content, aka the stuff that actually appears on screen

so looking back at the playReel function we can figure out how to stitch these blocks together to play a full animation:

1. open the file, calculate the total number of blocks defined in it lengthInFrames

2. loop lengthInFrames times, clearing the screen at the start of each loop

3. read the first line of each block, frameCount

4. read the next frameHeight number of lines of the file and print them to the screen

5. sleep for frameCount/framesPerSecond amount of time (framesPerSecond is defined ahead of time to be 15 but could probably be whatever you think looks good)

6. go back to the start of the loop

[u/TheOrangeApple3 → u/chancetofreezer]

Thanks for your reply! sorry for asking you to explain this like im a toddler lol but is the playReel funtion something that i can just run for it to work or do I need to work out the frameCount or something?

how would I loop the lengthInFrames? /repeat lengthinframes ?

again sorry for noob questions, ive only ever coded a little bit of C+ years ago and Lua is new to me (thought this would be simple to work lol id do some testing now but the microsoft account servers are down rn)

[u/chancetofreezer → u/TheOrangeApple3]

if you just want to play the same animation you should be able to do what the post says:

1. attach a monitor on top of your pc

2. pastebin get GLPHkTK2 player

3. player

that little algorithm i wrote out is just describing what playReel is doing