Cursor flicker appears in real-time (Windows)

[mcay23]

see : https://asciinema.org/a/KxW4FQuTg4bRPsbgML4AlJa57
Happens in real time.

Might be cleaner to rewrite the screen instead of clearing.

[thatcherclough]

okay first of all, that is a really cool animation. for testing purposes could you send it to me? also the problem with rewriting the screen is that if you have a frame that is 10 lines long and then the next frame is 9 lines long, the 10th line is still present when displaying the second frame. i will look into another fix, possibly making the cursor clear or something else!

[mcay23]

Here's the file
out.txt

From this repo BoardingSimulator

[thatcherclough]

Okay thanks! I will get right to work!

[thatcherclough]

Are you using a windows terminal or Linux terminal? You mentioned (Windows) in the title, however on asciinema it says it the OS is linux.

[mcay23]

I am using windows. Asciinema doesn't work with windows so I ran it through WSL to record the terminal. To clarify, I'm seeing the flickering both on windows and WSL.

Here's a screen recording of the issue in windows: link

[thatcherclough]

Alright, so I see the flickering on Windows, and because WSL runs from a windows terminal, it would make sense that the flickering is still present when running through WSL. I will work on finding a solution now!

[thatcherclough]

So here is what I have gathered after testing:

1. The flickering is because of the Windows terminal. When running the same command on my Mac computer, there is zero flickering.
2. The speed at which the windows terminal prints is slower than the speed at which the Mac terminal prints. I ran the same command on both a windows and mac computer at the same time, and the mac computer finished about 5 seconds earlier (You could increase the fps on the windows machine to fix this).
3. Removing the code that clears the screen dramatically reduces the flickering of the animation.

In order to fix the flickering, I added an option to specify if you want to clear the screen after every frame. From my experience, this removes the flickering of the animation, however it does not remove the flickering of the cursor. To fix the cursor flickering, you can go to the terminal properties and set the cursor to black.

Here is an updated JAR file. Can you test it with the argument -c set to false? thanks!

[mcay23]

Hi, I tested the new jar. It seems like setting -c to false or true doesn't change the flickering on windows, both outputs look identical to me. Thanks.

[thatcherclough]

Huh that’s weird. it fixed it on my windows machine. i will look into it more tomorrow!

[thatcherclough]

After further testing and research, the flickering is happening because of the Windows terminal, not AsciiAnimator. The only setting that I could find that effected the flickering was "legacy mode". Disabling this mode seemed to reduce the flickering when compared to when it was enabled. Because this problem is with windows terminal, not AsciiAnimator, I will be closing this issue. I have just released AsciiAnimator 1.1.0 that adds the -c option which stopped the flickering for me.

[mcay23]

Just wanted to let you know I got it to work. Looks like I was mixing up the .jar files, my bad. Works brilliantly now. Thanks a lot!