If you want to get into fixed-width character art, I highly recommend doing it in the browser like OP did rather than trying to old school it in the terminal. I have done a little ascii[0] and unicode[1] graphics, and the browser is such a better tool. You can set fonts and proportions and know exactly how things will render for the user. Mouse input, performance profiling and a bunch of other things are just better in the browser. Both of my projects work in the terminal but were browser first.
It is kind of shocking to me how TUIs are enjoying a bit of dev tool renaissance right now when the browser is such a capable platform.
> It is kind of shocking to me how TUIs are enjoying a bit of dev tool renaissance right now
For me, it's because I can SSH from my wimpy laptop to systems with hundreds of CPU cores and TBs of RAM - and use the same tools and workflows that I am used to.
It looks really good in the video uploaded, but when I tried it myself it didn't look the same and was hard to tell what was going on. Not sure what the issue is.
Same here. The video looks cool, but what I see is much messier and hard to identify shapes and objects. Tried on latest Brave and Firefox on Arch Linux.
Wouldn't it be better to use blocks (219 in ASCII) as the main paint unit and use some other half-block and "hashed" characters (ASCII 220, 223, 176-178) to implement dithering?
There are multiple extensions to ASCII. "Extended ASCII" isn't a single thing, but a category of single-byte character encodings which are supersets of ASCII.
“I wanted to build a city that feels alive, but is made entirely from ASCII characters.
This is a small custom engine built with JavaScript and Canvas — no Unity, Unreal, 3D models, textures, or shaders. The world is a grid-based city with roads, buildings, trees, cars, and pedestrians.
Every frame, the engine raycasts from the camera to work out perspective, depth, collisions, and what should be visible, then draws it all using letters, numbers, and symbols.
In other words: it’s a tiny 3D city made from blocks, viewed through a screen of ASCII characters.
Still a work in progress, but I’m going to keep pushing the atmosphere, detail, and interaction further.”
If you want to get into fixed-width character art, I highly recommend doing it in the browser like OP did rather than trying to old school it in the terminal. I have done a little ascii[0] and unicode[1] graphics, and the browser is such a better tool. You can set fonts and proportions and know exactly how things will render for the user. Mouse input, performance profiling and a bunch of other things are just better in the browser. Both of my projects work in the terminal but were browser first.
It is kind of shocking to me how TUIs are enjoying a bit of dev tool renaissance right now when the browser is such a capable platform.
[0] https://aleyan.com/projects/ascii-side-of-the-moon/ [1] https://ytirnity.com/play/hexwalker
> It is kind of shocking to me how TUIs are enjoying a bit of dev tool renaissance right now
For me, it's because I can SSH from my wimpy laptop to systems with hundreds of CPU cores and TBs of RAM - and use the same tools and workflows that I am used to.
It looks really good in the video uploaded, but when I tried it myself it didn't look the same and was hard to tell what was going on. Not sure what the issue is.
Same here. The video looks cool, but what I see is much messier and hard to identify shapes and objects. Tried on latest Brave and Firefox on Arch Linux.
Is the GitHub project the same as the videos? Seems like no.
Wow, that's interesting. It's a good start, and it would be interesting to see how the project develops.
Wouldn't it be better to use blocks (219 in ASCII) as the main paint unit and use some other half-block and "hashed" characters (ASCII 220, 223, 176-178) to implement dithering?
By leveraging characters, you can actually do a form of dithring! See this great interactive blog post: https://alexharri.com/blog/ascii-rendering
That was a really, really cool read!
Everything above 127 would be extended ASCII instead of strict ASCII, if that matters.
There are multiple extensions to ASCII. "Extended ASCII" isn't a single thing, but a category of single-byte character encodings which are supersets of ASCII.
This is really nice! is it accessible somewhere to play with?
The OP's first link is a demo, their second link is the source.
From the video description:
“I wanted to build a city that feels alive, but is made entirely from ASCII characters.
This is a small custom engine built with JavaScript and Canvas — no Unity, Unreal, 3D models, textures, or shaders. The world is a grid-based city with roads, buildings, trees, cars, and pedestrians.
Every frame, the engine raycasts from the camera to work out perspective, depth, collisions, and what should be visible, then draws it all using letters, numbers, and symbols.
In other words: it’s a tiny 3D city made from blocks, viewed through a screen of ASCII characters.
Still a work in progress, but I’m going to keep pushing the atmosphere, detail, and interaction further.”