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ASCII text rendering of the screen

In your harnessGodot shaderMIT

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.

Render of ASCII text rendering of the screen
The render its check recorded in Godot 4.7.2, 256 by 256 pixels.

What it takes and gives

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/

Limits. 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.

Details

Kind
Godot shader
Engine
Godot 4.3 or later
Files
11 files, 55.3 KB
Licence
MIT
Declared effects
reads files, runs commands
Checked with
Godot 4.7.2, opengl3 compatibility (Mesa llvmpipe, Xvfb)
Checks
contract static, engine run, engine log clean, shader in scene, capture written, render not uniform, shader changes pixels
Techniques
Luminance-indexed glyph selection, Bitmap glyphs packed into integers, Cell averaging by mip level
Tags
godot shader, spatial, post-process, ascii, text mode, terminal, retro, full-screen
Identity
library.supply.creative_originals.c6b8f304a0cb1d5fb869d432.c59783a051f43819
Version
c59783a051f43819d407812b8580260da40f38194d048996430da5b3b80490a0

The version is the SHA-256 of the item your harness downloads; every file in it names its own checksum.

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