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ASCII Clouds

caidan.dev

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Re: ASCII Clouds

#81

Post by mildmelon »

sandos wrote: post #42

and if you ctrl+- like 7 times youre back to showing clear pixels. If you set cell size to 4, then 5 times is enough :)

Author here. Haha that's so creative! I definitely thought about lowering the limit, but then it wouldn't really be ASCII-esque lol. I might just lower it so that you don't have to do this workaround.

Re: ASCII Clouds

#82

Post by mildmelon »

burnt-resistor wrote: post #21

Neat. It'd be more "ASCII" if it used 8x16 pixel (but right extended to 9x16) characters in 80:133 width:height aspect ratio since 80x25 characters at 720x400 on 4:3 results in 80:133 pixels. An arbitrary sized canvas is cool so long as the aspect ratio is preserved. The infamous MCGA/"VGA" mode 13h had pixels with an aspect ratio 6:5, while 320 x 240 Mode X was square (1:1). I still remember the unchained offset cal…

Author here.

Yes you're right in that it's not real ASCII, but more ASCII-esque. I took some artistic liberty to do everything on the GPU, if I had done true ASCII I would have had to move data back to the CPU and render the glyphs there. However it was too slow and didn't have the desired effect I was seeking.

I am considering building out an additional feature set where it allows for true ASCII rendering, but we'll see if I get around to that.

Re: ASCII Clouds

#85

Post by mildmelon »

publicdebates wrote: post #44

This is a genuine work of art. I don't care how impractical it is, it's utterly beautiful, and a joy to play with.

Author here. Thanks so much for the kind feedback, I appreciate that you are getting so much joy out of it!

Re: ASCII Clouds

#86

Post by mildmelon »

baalimago wrote: post #13

Here I'm being ridiculous but I was a bit disappointed that it was a canvas rendering and not a mono-font text block

Author here. Not ridiculous at all, the name is a bit of a misnomer. I had tried doing true ASCII but moving data back to the CPU to render it all was too slow. So I opted to recreate them as glyphs that are drawn using signed distance functions, which gets pretty close to looking like real ASCII while still being incredibly performant due to it never leaving the GPU.

Re: ASCII Clouds

#88

Post by mildmelon »

_f9cu wrote: post #17

What is this?

Author here. This is all done on the GPU using shaders. It's a few layers, and you can find the details over on my Bluesky post, feel free to read it there. I've been thinking about making a blog post covering how I went about building it.

https://bsky.app/profile/caidan.dev/post/3mcdwifkfvc2o

Re: ASCII Clouds

#89

Post by mildmelon »

Padriac wrote: post #6

I don't understand.

Author here.

It's a fun experiment into WebGL and graphics programming. I intended it to be a cool tool for getting inspiration for designing and creating other art in general. I do eventually want to build this out into a larger set of tools that would allow you to quickly iterate and build out various aesthetics for designing.

In it's current state, it's mostly practical for creating pretty images and videos that you could use in other projects. If there's more interest I could possibly turn it into more, would love to hear ideas and suggestions!

Re: ASCII Clouds

#90

Post by mildmelon »

keyle wrote: post #8
Padriac wrote: post #6

I don't understand.

I think it's just a technological show piece, basically built on top of open source libraries and a couple of algorithms.

Author here, you're mostly right in that it's a show piece. However, it uses no external libraries, I built it all myself using VanillaJS. I do use some famous noise algorithms, specifically Simplex noise and a method of domain warping.
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