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A walkable ASCII cyberpunk city in one HTML file [video]

136 points by keithcarolus 4 hours ago | 25 comments

ASCII City: Traffic and Detail Update - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSRooHo_HSI

ASCII City Update: Interiors, Elevation and Skyscrapers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCKEDWowc0o

This makes me deeply nostalgic. Starlight Zone from Sonic the Hedgehog is my favorite game level of all time and the aesthetic of this city is basically like stepping into the background of Starlight Zone.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZHR5OKDL81g

aleyan 3 hours ago

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

agys 2 hours ago

A couple of years ago I wrote extensive benchmarks on three browser-based rendering techniques: text in the DOM, 2D canvas, and WebGL canvas. The DOM approach is the purest, as it uses a font, and it can achieve very good performance. The only noticeable slowdown at 60 FPS occurs when the character color changes frequently within each line: each new character needs to be wrapped in a span. 2D canvas is a bit more flexible but not necessarily faster. WebGL is obviously the fastest, at 1000+ FPS, and pixel fonts can be rendered ultra-crisp as well.

Below is the DOM test for frequent vertical color changes. Press and hold the cursor over the ASCII output to change the orientation (notice the FPS drop at the top left).

https://play.ertdfgcvb.xyz/#/src/basics/performance_test

butlike 2 hours ago

In hexwalker, what does the AU/A0 button do? Also is there anything to "do" or is it more of a wanderlust simulator? I found a cave with a coffin but so far no items underfoot to use.

saintfire 2 hours ago

Popping into a TUI from an existing terminal session to quickly do something without lifting my hand is the only reason I use and prefer a TUI.

If I have to open a browser which has, frankly mediocre, kb nav, then I'd rather it just be a GUI.

I guess I'm a browser detractor, though, because unless its a webserver used for quick configs then I dread using them.

holsta 2 hours ago

> 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.

naet 3 hours ago

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.

fv3y 2 hours ago

The poster has conflated two different projects with a similar goal I believe.

The videos seem to come from a closed source project made by an outlet called Grow Now Games.

https://ko-fi.com/grownowgames/

https://www.grownowgames.com/

dang 2 hours ago

Yikes that would be my mistake - I was merging several submissions and thought it was the same project. Sorry!

The other links were:

https://cybercity.carino.systems/

https://github.com/MiguelCarino/CyberCity

rocmcd 2 hours ago

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.

jayturley 2 hours ago

The video showcases his new version. The live version is his old version.

SpyCoder77 2 hours ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310003

yboris 47 minutes ago

I posted this 15 days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49314380

Glad to see HN visitors finally see it on the front page :)

ChrisArchitect 49 minutes ago

Welcome. Not a dupe if no discussion after a period of time. Sometimes things just don't get traction. Resubmit is ok.

rvz 44 minutes ago

> Sometimes things just don't get traction. Resubmit is ok.

More like it was resubmitted a hundred times already.

jeffgreco 2 hours ago

Is the GitHub project the same as the videos? Seems like no.

felineflock 4 hours ago

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?

Darkphibre 3 hours ago

By leveraging characters, you can actually do a form of dithring! See this great interactive blog post: https://alexharri.com/blog/ascii-rendering

paavope 2 hours ago

That was a really, really cool read!

wewtyflakes 3 hours ago

Everything above 127 would be extended ASCII instead of strict ASCII, if that matters.

recursive 3 hours ago

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.

Transformanshen 3 hours ago

Wow, that's interesting. It's a good start, and it would be interesting to see how the project develops.

keithcarolus 3 weeks ago

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.”

supermatt 3 weeks ago

This is really nice! is it accessible somewhere to play with?

avidruntime 4 hours ago

The OP's first link is a demo, their second link is the source.