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

100

kkeithcarolus about 2 hours ago 20 commentsRead Article on youtube.com

ZH version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

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

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

90% Positive

Analyzed from 541 words in the discussion.

Discussion (20 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

SpyCoder77•2 minutes ago

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

aleyan•about 1 hour 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

butlike•11 minutes 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•36 minutes 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•43 minutes 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•about 1 hour 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•26 minutes 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•5 minutes 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•44 minutes 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•27 minutes ago

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

jeffgreco•about 1 hour ago

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

felineflock•about 2 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•about 2 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•about 1 hour ago

That was a really, really cool read!

wewtyflakes•about 2 hours ago

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

recursive•about 2 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•about 1 hour ago

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

supermatt•14 days ago

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

avidruntime•about 2 hours ago

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

keithcarolus•15 days 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.”