Explore This 3D World Rendered In ASCII Art:
Pixelated RPGs are pretty standard in games like Legend of Zelda and Pokemon, but have you ever seen anything like ASCIICKER? It’s a full-color three-dimensional world rendered with ASCII art and playable in your browser. [Ed's Comment: It works with Brave and Firefox, but not with Pale Moon in our very limited testing.]
For the time being, the game exists as an experiment. There’s no storyline or goals other than exploring the world, although you can meet up with (or follow) others exploring the game — although all of the sprites look the same, so it may be difficult to have interactions. The game was created by [Gumix] and built entirely in JavaScript without using any other game engines.
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https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/01/this-pdf-contains-a-playable-copy-of-doom/
Here at Ars, we're suckers for stories about hackers getting Doom running on everything from CAPTCHA robot checks and Windows' notepad.exe to AI hallucinations and fluorescing gut bacteria. Despite all that experience, we were still thrown for a loop by a recent demonstration of Doom running in the usually static confines of a PDF file.
On the Github page for the quixotic project, coder ading2210 discusses how Adobe Acrobat included some robust support for JavaScript in the PDF file format.
[...] the Doom PDF can take inputs via the user typing in a designated text field and generate "video" output in the form of converted ASCII text fed into 200 individual text fields, each representing a horizontal line of the Doom display. The text in those fields is enough to simulate a six-color monochrome display at a "pretty poor but playable" 13 frames per second (about 80 ms per frame).
[...] have to dock at least a few coolness points because the port doesn't actually work on generic desktop versions of Adobe Acrobat—you need to load it through a Chromium-based web browser. But the project gains those coolness points back with a web front-end that lets users load generic WAD files into a playable PDF.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2020, @06:50AM (5 children)
This webpage uses not just proprietary javascript, but proprietary binary code in a format called WebAssembly [wikipedia.org].
So basically, now they want you to download and run proprietary binary software on your computer, just to view a web page. The browser is expected to run this software automatically, without prompting the user. Great! Nothing bad ever happened from downloading and automatically running proprietary binary code from unknown websites.
A June 2019 study showed that the most popular uses of WebAssembly are:
*Cryptocurrency mininng
*Bypassing javascript mitigations for Meltdown and Spectre
*General malicious code, which is easier to hide from malware scanners than javascript, because it is in binary and more easily obfuscated
I see nothing wrong with this at all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2020, @07:02AM (2 children)
Can you cite that study please?
(Score: 3, Informative) by coolgopher on Friday January 03 2020, @07:16AM (1 child)
I believe it's the one cited on the provided wikipedia link.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2020, @10:06AM
There's 70 citations there. Five (!) of them point to the study that https://www.infoq.com/news/2019/10/WebAssembly-wasm-malicious-usage/ [infoq.com] summarizes, which seems to be the one GP related.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2020, @08:30AM
Because there is nothing wrong, paisano. Capisce?
(Score: 2) by NickM on Friday January 03 2020, @02:06PM
Webassembly or obfuscated (not just minimized) js, both need external tool to be properly analyzed, both are a plague!
To reverse wasm I use https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt [github.com] on wasm files to produce c code and on obfuscated js I use http://relentless-coding.org/projects/jsdetox/ [relentless-coding.org] to produce comprehensible js, in both cases the resulting files must be manually annotated before they are truly readable.
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 3, Touché) by Dr Spin on Friday January 03 2020, @10:25AM
The top priority needs to be implementing "Help"!
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2020, @10:52AM (1 child)
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Friday January 03 2020, @05:33PM
Maybe it's Ford-style multiplayer: You can have any number of players, as long as that number is 1.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 03 2020, @05:00PM (3 children)
ASCII rendering is just a form of low resolution textures - so, while this is pretty cool in as far as it goes, all the ASCII is doing is creating an excuse for a super low resolution render of the 3D scene.
As for AC's whinging about WebAssembly - Coward does fit well. The point of WebAssembly is that it runs in a safe sandbox, whether that's binary or fully commented Java, Javascript or Fortran the potential for evil is basically the same - 99.9% of users will never look at the source anyway, and if there's a weakness in the sandbox it can be exploited in any language.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2020, @08:37PM (1 child)
Your last sentence sort of proves the AC's complaint because you wouldn't have that flawed sandbox on your system if you never ran it in the first place.
(Otherwise I tried to undo your Flamebait mod with an Underrated because I don't know what flame you are supposedly baiting to deserve it).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 05 2020, @04:29AM
You mean Chrome? Yeah, Chrome's not perfect, neither is Windows, Ubuntu, OS-X, iOS, Android, etc. Still, WebAssembly is the latest in a long line of attempts to make it "safe" to run software you just clicked on... as long as it doesn't have access to any "valuable" resources on your system and can be easily terminated and removed that's possible, but... they always seem to want to leave the door open for persistence of values, and access to hardware that you might wish they didn't have access to, etc. and that's how malware can get written.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04 2020, @04:14AM
ASCII rendering like this, or with the picture/video>ASCII conversion stuff that's around, is just a toy, or a cool learning project. ASCII graphics in roguelikes are completely different - it's a liberation from the limitations of graphical presentation. The player is free to imagine and view the world and it's inhabitants naturally, making it much more "real". I've had way more heart-pounding encounters playing ADOM or Angband than any of these modern games with realistic graphics and actors and all that fancy shit.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday January 04 2020, @08:53PM (1 child)
The hackaday site shows rotating the entire world to see it from diferent directions.
But when I use the ASCIICKER link there seems to be no obvious way to do this.
And the worlds shown in the hackaday post are a lot bigger than to one in the ASCIICKER link.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Sunday January 05 2020, @03:08PM
I found out that not only do the arrows move the little guy around, but also a-s-d-w... and the letters q and e rotate. Spacebar jumps.
Of course, without some form of keyboard shortcut help, I had to find out by trial and error. Not sure if there is anything else I missed. I tried to look for a zoom function but never found it.