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ASCII Clouds

caidan.dev

61–70 of 99 posts

Re: ASCII Clouds

#61

That is so beautiful. The underlying algorithm is perlin noise (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlin_noise ) and it's over 40 years old! It's such a fabulous tool as the generated images can be used for effects like glass/ice displacements, cheap water-like effects, but you can also generate terrains from it or just cool visual effects that benefit from random patterns. The core property to me is that it feels ve…

I think it's technically Simplex noise, but yes also developed by Perlin.

Author here, yes you are correct that it's Simplex noise. I also use a method of domain warping, I used this article as reference https://iquilezles.org/articles/warp/

Re: ASCII Clouds

#62
post #12

This is cool... But I feel like having different color/brightness for each symbol kinda defeats the purpose of it being ASCII when the symbols only correspond to different intensities anyway.

Author here, I understand where you are coming from. However I did choose to keep it this way as it generally looks better. I toyed with other methods and I may introduce them in as a setting.

Re: ASCII Clouds

#63

Given the name, I expected more actual ASCII characters/options and selectable text. Visually appealing and fun to play with, however.

Author here, yeah I apologize for the misnomer. I could render it with actual ASCII but it was too slow because of needing to process it on the CPU. My method here is actually done all on the GPU and draws glyphs similar to how fonts are drawn. Well actually I'm using signed distance functions to draw the glyphs, but the glyphs are ASCII-esque.

Re: ASCII Clouds

#65

I had a similar effect for a C program I wrote a long time ago (I think 2007?). Here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4j-BkwMB20 and the code: https://github.com/kristopolous/ascsee I just updated it so it compiles on modern systems. I also found the original version if you like being an archaeologist: https://9ol.es/tmp/gol.c

Author here. Wow that’s so cool, thank you for sharing!

Re: ASCII Clouds

#66

cool. but if it's really about ASCII then I expect to have possibility to copy/paste a cloudy sky in my text editor ;-P

It dies with lots of WebGL errors here, so I only see a white page. So that's definitely not ASCII in my book. Would be more fun to have an actual text based output indeed.

Author here, can you elaborate more on what kind of WebGL errors you are getting?

Re: ASCII Clouds

#68

Spent longer than I'd like to admit trying to recreate the Balatro background effect...

Author here, love that you tried to recreate the Balatro background. I was also similarly obsessed with that game last year. If you were able to recreate it I’d love to see, I just added more sharing capabilities to the tool.

Re: ASCII Clouds

#69

Nice. This looks similar to what I have implemented: https://www.npmjs.com/package/asciiground , but I intended it more as a library where a user could program their own patterns by extending the existing systems. Sadly, my GitHub account got flagged, so there is no way to access the repository or GitHub pages for the demo at the moment.

Author here, thanks for sharing your library looks very useful! I’ll have to check it out for sure!

Re: ASCII Clouds

#70
post #39

Super fun! I was exploring this type of thing as one of my first experiments with Claude Code early last year. https://github.com/pj4533/asciidelic https://asciidelic.com I should go back and add mobile support, maybe fullscreen support.

Author here, I love that tool you built. Super nice effects and I’d love to see mobile support if you add it.
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