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godot shaders

ASCII text rendering of the screen

Render the scene as text: the screen is cut into character cells, each cell's brightness picks one of ten 5 x 5 bitmap glyphs from sparse to dense, drawn in the cell colour or a single terminal colour.

Recorded render of ASCII text rendering of the screen

What this component contains

  • ATTRIBUTION.md
  • LICENSE
  • README.md
  • component.json
  • demo.tscn
  • inspect_shader.py
  • material.tres
  • post_ascii_glyphs.gdshader
  • preview.png
  • test_package.py
  • verification/native.json

How it works

Shader type
spatial
Render modes
unshaded, cull_disabled, depth_test_disabled, depth_draw_never, skip_vertex_transform, fog_disabled
Parameters
screen_texture (sampler2D), cell_pixels (float = 8), use_scene_color (bool = yes), text_color (vec4 = 0.4, 1, 0.5, 1), background_color (vec4 = 0.02, 0.03, 0.04, 1), contrast (float = 1.3), color_boost (float = 1.4)
Use it on
A MeshInstance3D with a 2 x 2 QuadMesh, `material.tres` as its material override and a large extra cull margin, as in `demo.tscn`.
Result
The scene redrawn as coloured characters, dense glyphs in bright areas and dots in dark ones.
Renderers
compatibility: compiled and rendered, forward plus: not verified, mobile: not verified
Placement
res://baltor/godot_shaders/post_ascii_glyphs/

Recorded checks

godot 4.7.2.stable.official.ed1daf0bf

  • contract_static
  • engine_run
  • engine_log_clean
  • shader_in_scene
  • capture_written
  • render_not_uniform
  • shader_changes_pixels

Limits to consider

Ten glyph levels and a 5 x 5 grid limit detail; the cell size should be at least 6 pixels for legible glyphs. Mip averaging is box filtered. The pass reads Godot's screen texture after opaque geometry, so transparent objects drawn after it are not processed and its order among other transparent passes is not controlled.