A walkable ASCII cyberpunk city in one HTML file [video] | Hacker News Reader

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

youtube.com

401 pointskeithcarolus65 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

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.

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.

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.

AU/AO are auto explore underworld and overworld and A0 is to stop auto explore. You can click on them in the top menu.

> Also is there anything to "do" or is it more of a wanderlust simulator? It is mostly just a technology demonstrator for having a hexagonal grid map in the terminal. There is nothing to do. I am prototyping some gameplay features around interacting with the environment, but I expect the end result will be very light weight gameplay that more "A Short Hike" than nethack.

Nice, thanks for the reply. For what it's worth, I like the sparse nature of the game so far, and yeah, agree on not trying to make it into nethack.

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

I suspect DOM is probably fast enough for most usecases. For me, DOM only started chugging because every tile (2 half-width characters in hexwalker) was a react element and those would get garbage collected en-masse and cause studder.

> 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.

Command line tools (and by extension TUIs) can be used over SSH and don't require messing around with HTTPS certificates. They also have the benefit of having the context of your CWD.

> don't require messing around with HTTPS certificates.

Which also means there’s no real defense against MITM attacks… at least I don’t think anyone seriously checks the host key on first connection.

You get notified if the server key changes though. I don't think it's fair to say there's no defense against MITM.

That doesn't protect against MITM happening on the first connect.

Most reasonable countries have the same defense against that as you get against someone stabbing you. I don't see many security professionals insisting that you have to walk around in plate mail for some reason.

Having made`ssh mario.baby` and https://mario.baby (visa was) from the same code.. I'd choose https any day.

>when the browser is such a capable platform

Seriously? Why would you want to open a memory heavy browser tab to run a TUI? This attitude is how we got Electron.

Browser as an app platform, should be used as a last resort.

I built sshfighter.com recently and pushed terminal graphics to the limit (with no kity)

You have to zoom out to get more pixels for it to look good (and press v to switch rendering engine if it starts off poor)

> ssh sshfighter.com

And instructions on how to do it are here -> https://github.com/thomasdavis/sshfighter.com/blob/main/docs...

(the homepage is ai generated, the real work is in the ssh server)

Uh.. that looks freakin' awesome. How?!

aha i've been hacking away at the terminal graphics over ssh for ages for months, the repo is fully open source.

the sprites aren't all the same size or as good as they could be but already spent too much $$ on sprites.

the sprites are just passed through algorithms that optimize for what text characters at different aspects would make them look good.

I was pretty proud of my Game of Life & Wireworld implementations for the terminal, with half-character resolution o.o; Guess I'll have to up my game and start work on Twin Cobra and Dune ][ clones.. now that I've seen it's possible..

Using sprites is clever :-) then I guess that's how these older games worked too.

would love to see what you build. i am working a ssh mmorpg, about to start working on the lore

I’m doing a ssh mush, vintage style.

This is awesome. I did the same, sshwars.com [NSFW]. Mine is def not as graphic cool as yours but different game play.

OP: Amazing ascii world! I love old school terminal style everything.

Site down?

because modern browsers are monsters that a lot of us want to avoid

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.

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

Rhys is the developer of the video version, a person named Miguel wrote the version that was linked with source code. The CONTRACT.md in Miguel's version suggests AI usage, as does commit history (I'm not a zealot about this, but I do note it). I think Rhys's version is more handcrafted, but also much less accessible, being pay-to-play and being delivered in obfuscated WASM.

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/

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

It's beautiful, but when I went to try it out myself it seems it's pay to play?

https://ko-fi.com/s/e1e0f91951

Note that's "Prototype 1", and I gather the more developed v2 (featured in the update video) isn't available yet.

I bought the game so I could study the code. Unfortunately it is wasm & obfuscated. I'm gonna see what my handy dandy big giant brain buddies can do with it.

Says it's in one HTML file... well, where? Why post a video if you could just link to it? I don't see a link to it anywhere, and I'm not watching a youtube video to look at an HTML file.

There is a link in the video description.

You have to pay for the demo...

Ah yes, let me just whip out my wallet real quick and pay for a demo of an HTML file. I'll _definitely_ be doing that.

To be fair it's a great way to accept donations.

It's not a donation if they're actually selling a file.

Maybe we have a different definition of "donation", but it requires you to pay at least $2.50 to access it. Sounds like a purchase, not a donation. And for a demo of an HTML document.

I love the way this looks very interesting and impressive. One does wonder if as you keep making it more realistic, does it begin to lose it's ASCII nature a bit and become more like a normal rendered game to look at. I think it looks beautiful as it is at the moment and can not wait to see more of this.

This is an ad. Furthemore, what is being sold, for money, is a simple prototype of a basic 3D renderer.

wtf are you talking about

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

This was really impressive. Looking at the comments, I didn't realize there was a whole ASCII art underground. I don't want to sound negative at all, but it would have been nice to seem some recognizable letters to drive home that it's ASCII.

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?

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.

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!

Reminds me of textmode demos https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=24206

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

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

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

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

More like it was resubmitted a hundred times already.

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 :)

Reminds me of classic DOS text adventures, but with a modern cyberpunk twist. Love the aesthetic and the clever single-file packaging.

Seriously impressive browser tech pushing what's possible in one HTML file. The ASCII art and walking mechanic are brilliant.

Reminds me of old MUDs, but elevated with a proper walkable city. Super clever use of pure HTML for this whole experience.

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

Where’s said HTML page?

dang above said they messed up merging 2 different submissions into this one.

IDK if the video paid one is a html file, but here's the other (less impressive but still impressive) submission, playable, plus source html:

https://cybercity.carino.systems/

https://github.com/MiguelCarino/CyberCity

WASD to move etc, 1-2-3-4 for CyberCity - Frontier - Moonwalk - Edo

Another example when technology can be just used to do cool things, art, and not only be useful (besides beiing a learning experience by the author)

love it. It has a mood

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.”

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.

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