Growing out an unharvested garlic head

For some reason I tried, and I know I am not the only person to do so, as I've seen others mention doing so... was leaving a head of garlic in the ground where it had grown, and to see what happened after another year.  The response when someone else who mentioned doing this got, was that the cramped cloves would turn into much smaller heads - therefore it wasn't worth doing.

This is the garlic head sprouting way back in early July.

Unharvested garlic head sprouting 

And the same head harvested in early January, pretty much six months later.

Harvested heads from the unharvested head

These heads are tiny, and the effect of the cramped cloves is obvious.  I put a New Zealand one dollar coin in there for size perspective.  If the goal is to pick the largest cloves you grow, and to replant them to hopefully encourage larger cloves further down the line, it is common sense not to leave your garlic in the ground.  It's a waste of good seed material.

Adding Curses support to Incursion

Incursion as long as I've been playing it, has always used a 2D graphical library to do it's graphics.  Before the open source release, it was Allegro, and after, it became libtcod which uses SDL2 behind the scenes.  But the problem with graphical libraries, is that the interface is presented on the screen as a static image.  And this means that people who can't see good, cannot play.

Would adding a terminal-based interface, like using curses, solve this problem? ...  Possibly.  Until it is using one, and a person who can't see good tries it out with their screen reader, I'm not sure it's possible to know for sure.

I use the premier operating system, Windows.  I know it's premier because the latest version does edgy shit, like cram a cheap looking tablet interface on the top of the new versions, and everyone not using a tablet gets a constrained and simple interface that doesn't do half of what it used to.  On Windows, we don't have a native terminal program that handles ANSI escape codes.  This is typically how terminals are implemented.  What we do have is a DOS console that does it's own special thing.

Shitty Windows 8 tablet UI

Fortunately, many many years ago, someone wrote a cross-platform curses implementation by the name of PDCurses, that has the bizarrely arcane and complex API that all curses programmers are familiar with, and that makes a DOS console look like it was doing all the nice stuff a Linux terminal window would otherwise do.  PDCurses is dated, but compiles easily, and integrates with little difficulty into existing projects.

The original PDCurses 3.4

Don't confuse it with the confusingly named PDCurses for "real" windows, which has had more recent work done on it.  This does not work in the DOS console, and opens a new window, where it does whatever it does.  Honestly, I have no idea whatever it is doing.  It maybe does it graphically?  The web page lists lots of changes, but isn't clear about whether this is a suitable replacement for the original PDCurses.

PDCurses for "real" windows

Besides allowing the tools (like screen readers) which people who can't see good use to access the console data, there are other advantages.  When people are playing in a Linux terminal, they can capture the data the terminal receives and displays.  This is an interleaved mix of ANSI escape codes and text.  It can be played back, to watch someone else playing.  On Windows, by using PDCurses, something like termrec polls the DOS console by the same Windows API that screen readers use, and recreates something resembling the best kind of low quality interleaved mix of ANSI escape codes and text that can be approximated from the data available.

I'm 90% of the way to implementing the Incursion curses UI.  It's completely untested, and based on Incursion's internal console implementation, it was likely the original implementation used curses.  There are few issues remaining before it can be tested.  Something that libraries like libtcod, SDL and Allegro do, is provide a higher level file system API.  This needs to be replaced.  And then there's the issue of how curses handles colours.  This is a complicated mess.  But I'm sure it's a solved problem that others can shine some light on, so I'll ask about it on the roguetemple forums.

At this point, I'm wondering if it would be better to implement a telnet server, and to have Incursion serve the stream of interleaved ANSI escape codes and text that Linux terminals expect.  Then anyone who plays it could use Putty to do so.