Asciiquarium Documentation

Asciiquarium requires the following Perl modules:

• Term::Animation
• Curses

Both modules can be obtained from CPAN. Note that this program requires a platform with a Curses library; it is not natively supported on Windows, though it may run under Cygwin.

Standard Ubuntu installations do not include the necessary Perl modules. Follow these steps to install the requirements:

1. Install the Perl curses package via apt: sudo apt-get install libcurses-perl
2. Run cpan at the shell and accept all default settings. Type quit to exit.
3. Install the animation module using sudo: sudo cpan Term::Animation

sudo apt-get install libcurses-perl
cpan
# (accept defaults, then type 'quit')
sudo cpan Term::Animation

While the animation is running, you can use the following keyboard shortcuts to control the experience:

• q: Quit the application.
• r: Redraw (recreates all entities in the aquarium).
• p: Toggle pause/play.

When launching Asciiquarium from the command line, you can use the following flag:

• -c: Enables "classic" mode, which restricts the display to species available in Asciiquarium 1.0.