ASCII/ANSI Art & Flooding
The term "IRC Art" is used to refer to text based visual art found on IRC. The art found on IRC has evolved past using just ASCII charcters. IRC clients today understand a number of special formatting characters. These characters allow IRC software to send and receive colors and formatting codes such as bold, italics, underline and others. This allows more possibilites now for creating ASCII/ANSI art for IRC. While it is possible to have support for 99 or even 256 colors, most art made for IRC follows the 16 color standard. In order to properly execute playing art in an IRC channel, it is generally agreed that you want to pump the art as quickly as possible. That means, any client or server side throttling can make pumping large art heavily delayed or interrepted. You also want to make sure you have full support for viewing UTF-8 unicode characters.
SETUP OS
echo "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" > /etc/locale.confecho "en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8" > /etc/locale.genlocale-gen
Place the following lines in your ~/.bashrc file:
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8export LANG=en_US.UTF-8export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
Then run source ~/.bashrc to make the changes take affect.
If you are using GNU screen, make sure defutf8 on is in your screenrc file.
SETUP CLIENT
IRSSI
UTF-8
/set term_charset utf-8/set recode_autodetect_utf8 ON/set recode_fallback ISO-8859-15/set recode_out_default_charset ISO-8859-15/set recode_transliterate ON/set recode ON
Flooding
/set cmd_queue_speed 0msec(global)/set cmds_max_at_once 0(global)/network add -cmdmax 0 -cmdspeed 0msec <network_name>(network specific)
Note: Change 0 to 10 for safe flood rates on networks like EFNet.
HexChat/xChat
UTF-8
Edit your network and change "Character set" to "UTF-8 (Unicode)" for all of your networks.
Font
Navigate to Settings->Preferences->Interface->Text box and set the font to monospace normal size 9.
Colors
Locate your colors.conf file in either the AppData (Windows) or ~/.xchat2 (Linux) directory and replace the first 16 lines with the follow:
color_0 = ffff ffff ffff
color_1 = 0000 0000 0000
color_2 = 0000 0000 7f7f
color_3 = 0000 9393 0000
color_4 = ffff 0000 0000
color_5 = 7f7f 0000 0000
color_6 = 9c9c 0000 9c9c
color_7 = fcfc 7f7f 0000
color_8 = ffff ffff 0000
color_9 = 0101 fcfc 0000
color_10 = 0000 9393 9393
color_11 = 0101 ffff ffff
color_12 = 0000 0000 fcfc
color_13 = ffff 0000 ffff
color_14 = 7f7f 7f7f 7f7f
color_15 = d2d2 d2d2 d2d2
Flooding
/set net_throttle 0
WeeChat
/set irc.server_default.anti_flood_prio_high 0(global)/set irc.server_default.anti_flood_prio_low 0(global)/set irc.server.<network_name>.anti_flood_prio_high 0(network specific)/set irc.server.<network_name>.anti_flood_prio_low 0(network specific)
Note: Change 0 to 2 for safe flood rates on networks like EFNet.
ZNC
/msg *controlpanel setnetwork floodburst $me $network 0/msg *controlpanel setnetwork floodrate $me $network 0
RESOURCES
Drawing Tools
• ASCII Pumper - Old school MS-Paint style drawing tool. (Created by Lampiasis)• IRC Paint - Mid school MS-Paint style drawing tool. (Created by Pedrobear/wwared)
• mIRCART Tools - New school MS-Paint style drawing tool. (Created by arab/vxp)
• ASCII Maker - Draw IRC art straight from your web browser. (Created by infid3l)
• PabloDraw - ANSI art drawing tool.
Art Tools
• A2M - Convert ANSI art to IRC art. (Created by tater)• IMG2Term - Output art to your terminal. (Created by Pedrobear/wwared)
• IRC2HTML - Convert IRC ASCII art to HTML. (Created by acidvegas)
• Scroll - Full featured IRC bot to play art. (Created by acidvegas)
Art Packs
• IRCArt - All packs organized into one ultimate pack.• mIRCART Packs - Art pack made by the #mircart crew on EFNet.
• PP4L Pack - Giant listing of PP4L art from EFNet.
• TrollASCII Pack - Giant mess of unorganized art.
• Volatile Pack - Art pack containing other packs and some OC.