This fully walkable 3D city was built entirely out of ASCII art

[Shawn Knight]

In a nutshell: Cutting-edge hardware and advanced game engines have allowed developers to create increasingly realistic 3D worlds. Even the latest and greatest titles still have a long way to go before virtual environments become indistinguishable from reality, but at the current rate of progress, that eventuality may not be too far off. On the opposite end of the spectrum – and to some, even more impressive – are projects that do more with less, like this walkable city made entirely of ASCII characters.

Grow Now Games, a self-professed one person indie game developer, recently shared the project on YouTube. The dev said his goal was to build a cyberpunk-style city that felt alive, and to build the whole thing using only ASCII characters. So, that's what he did.

The project uses a small custom engine made using JavaScript and Canvas. The virtual environment is populated with buildings, roads, trees, cars, and pedestrians, and uses camera tricks to work out perspective, depth, and collision for added realism. For something built using only letters, numbers, and symbols, it's incredibly immersive.

Related: Watch this typewriter pound out ASCII selfies

Games like Minecraft have proven that you don't need advanced graphics to create a fun and compelling experience, and this is yet another example of that.

Modern ASCII art dates back to the mid-60s but was more widely adopted in the 70s and 80s. Usage declined as computer graphics evolved, but the style remained popular among certain segments of computing enthusiasts and in the hacker community.

The dev said the walkable city is still a work in progress, and noted that he plans to keep advancing the atmosphere, the amount of detail, and interactive elements further. The video already has north of a million views and has generated over 9,000 comments. With any luck, the project will continue and who knows, perhaps it could evolve into the next big thing.

Found is a TechSpot feature where we share clever, funny or otherwise interesting stuff from around the web.

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This fully walkable 3D city was built entirely out of ASCII art

 

[Plutoisaplanet]

And this, boys and girls, is basically how LiDAR-based self-driving cars see the world.

 

[stewi0001]

I wish I had the drive to make something like this

 

[RudyBob]

Cool for about 15 seconds

 

[yRaz]

I want to play a game with graphics like that. That looks awesome. One reason I don't like modern games is all the fancy rendering tricks in UE5 are just a substitution for style and character.

I see companies advertising about their graphical features first as a red flag. It's like a restaurant talking about how they have ketchup. I don't care if you have ketchup if your burgers and fries aren't any good. Doesn't matter what toppings you have if everything underneath sucks.

I could see a story driven cyberpunk crime/mystery RPG being perfect for an engine like this

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Really neat but honestly started giving me a headache and making my eyes feel weird after about 1-2 minutes so that's about as deep as I go on this.

 

[OortCloud]

Very cool.

 

[Axeia]

Mplayer has an option to render movies to a console as ASCII.
So doing this quick and dirty for any game would be rather trivial, capture, decode with mplayer - result.

(I made an image to ASCII converter doing just that like 2 decades ago)

 

[VitalyT]

No ray tracing?