SadConsole is a C#-based .NET cross-platform terminal, ascii, console, game engine. It simulates these types of programs and with it you can make ascii-styled games for modern platforms. At its heart, SadConsole is really a giant tile-based game engine. However, its object model is conceptually similar to a traditional console app.

While SadConsole is a generic library that doesn't provide any rendering capabilities, "host" libraries are provided that add renderers to SadConsole. The two hosts provided by this library are for SadConsole.Host.MonoGame and SadConsole.Host.SFML. When adding a host library to your project, you don't need to reference the base SadConsole package. If you use MonoGame, you'll also need to add a rendering NuGet package, such as MonoGame.Framework.DesktopGL.

SadConsole currently targets .NET 6, .NET 7, .NET 8, and .NET 9

For the latest changes in this release, see the notes below

Here are some of the features SadConsole supports:

• Show any number of consoles of any size.
• Uses graphical tile-based images to build out an ASCII-character font with support for more than 256 characters.
• Fonts are simply sprite sheet tilesets tied to ascii codes, you can use full graphical tiles if you want.
• Use more than one font file. However, each console is restricted to a single font.
• Full GUI system for interactive controls such as list boxes, buttons, and text fields.
• Importers for DOS ANSI files, TheDraw text fonts, RexPaint, and Playscii.
• Animated consoles and instruction system to chain commands together.
• String encoding system for colors and effects while printing.
• Entity support for drawing thousands of movable objects on the screen
• Translating images to text-blocks.
• Keyboard and mouse support.
• Highly customizable framework.

Note: .NET 6 has been dropped by the host libraries in favor of .NET 8 as the minimum version. The core SadConsole library still supports .NET 6.

• [Breaking] The MonoGame host no longer has the ClearScreenComponent. Instead, the clear screen happens right before the final draw of the main SadConsole component.
• [Breaking] Builder.Run was renamed to Builder.ProcessConfigs and a new Builder.Run was added to make it simpler to configure and start the game.
• [Breaking] Custom controls should NO LONGER set IsDirty = false when exiting UpdateAndRedraw.
• [Core] A little speed improvement to resize in special cases.
• [Core] Added SetGlyph method overload to ICellSurface which takes a GlyphDefinition to update the glyph and mirror of a cell.
• [Core] Fixed a bug with dragging a surface over another surface incorrectly triggering MoveToFront functionality.
• [Extended] Added MouseDrag component.
• [Hosts] Added OptimizedScreenSurfaceRenderer which is a renderer that only draws dirty cells.
• [UI] During control rendering, hosts will set controls IsDirty = false when they're actually drawn instead of when the update method of the control says it should be drawn.
• [UI] Fixed combo box popup with non-1x sized fonts.