What it is

ASCII Visual Engine is a TypeScript library that turns a canvas into a live grid of text characters and animates it. Version . This page is the harness, a test rig that exposes every subsystem. The engine has no UI of its own. Apps embed it and build their own controls.

What it does

Every frame the engine fills a grid of cells with a glyph and a brightness, then paints them at 60 fps. The grid can be driven by procedural patterns, physics simulations, an image, video, webcam, SVG logo, or a line of type, and modulated by audio, MIDI, keyboard, or pointer.

• Presets · 30 built in looks. Morphing blends one look into another over a chosen number of seconds.
• Patterns, effects, motion · radial, spiral, wave, cellular patterns · burst, glitch, trails, noise effects · flow field, orbital, breathing motion, with tempo sync.
• Simulations · particles, boids, cellular automata, reaction diffusion, L-systems, gravity, springs, fluid.
• Sources · image, SVG, video, webcam, canvas, and text as the brightness map, with invert, mask, threshold, and sub cell anti aliasing.
• Audio · Web Audio input, FFT features, beat detection with BPM, mapped to any control or to notes.
• Input · Web MIDI with learn and device presets, MIDI clock sync, keyboard and pointer play, and take recording for rehearsals.
• Rendering · Canvas 2D and DOM, HiDPI, layered compositing with blend modes, post processing passes, eleven glyph libraries.
• Export · PNG, SVG, GIF, ASCII text, JSON scenes, frame recording with scrub, and WebM or MP4 video with audio.
• Performance and scripting · quality presets with adaptive scaling, a frame profiler, deterministic seeds, a sandboxed script API.

How to use it

• Pick a look from Preset. Its sliders are the controls that preset reads. Set morph seconds to crossfade between looks.
• Open a section to drive one subsystem. Each control below a summary maps to one engine call.
• Source loads an image, SVG, video, webcam, or typed text into the grid. Blend mixes it with the pattern; Mask cuts the pattern to its shape.
• Audio asks for the microphone. Input connects a MIDI device; Learn binds the next knob you touch.
• Export saves a frame, a GIF, a scene file, or records video. Input records and replays takes.
• Keys · H hides this panel · Space fires a burst · ? opens this page · Esc closes it.
• Boot straight into a look with ?preset=<id> in the URL. Save this look as JSON writes a preset you can load back or ship in an app.

Install in an app with npm install github:nate-thousand/ascii-visual-engine#v and call createEngine(canvas, options). Docs and source: github.com/nate-thousand/ascii-visual-engine.