Rendering an ASCII game in real-time with AI (100ms latency)
8 comments
·August 28, 2025sjsdaiuasgdia
actuallyalys
Yeah, as interesting as the concept is, the lack of frame to frame consistency is a real problem. It also seems like the computing requirements would be immense—the article mentions burning through $10 in seconds.
faeyanpiraat
Yeah, but I find this fascinating regardless.
This is getting into the direction of a kind of simulation where stuff is not determined by code but a kind of "real" physics.
roxolotl
Why does using a language/vision model feel more “real” to you than using equations which directly describe our understandings of physics?
curl-up
Not OP, but I have long thought of this type of approach (underlying "hard coded" object tracking + fuzzy AI rendering) to be the next step, so I'll respond.
The problem with using equations is that they seem to have plateaued. Hardware requirements for games today keep growing, and yet every character still has that awful "plastic skin", among all the other issues, and for a lot of people (me included) this creates heavy uncanny-valley effects that makes modern games unplayable.
On the other hand, images created by image models today look fully realistic. If we assume (and I fully agree that this is a strong and optimistic assumption) that it will soon be possible to run such models in real time, and that techniques for object permanence will improve (as they keep improving at an incredible phase right now), then this might finally bring us to the next level of realism.
Even if realism is not what you're aiming for, I think it's easy to imagine how this might change the game.
g105b
I've been trying to achieve the opposite of this project: render scenes in ASCII/ANSI in the style of old BBS terminal games. I've had terrible success so far. All the AI models I've tried only understand the concept of "pixel art" and not ASCII/ANSI graphics such as what can be seen on https://www.bbsing.com/ , https://16colo.rs , or on Reddit's r/ANSIart/ .
If anyone has any tips for how I could achieve this, I would love to hear your ideas.
elpocko
Do you mean you want to use AI to generate new scenes in ANSI-art style, or do you mean you want to use AI to render pre-existing scenes as ANSI art?
curtisszmania
[dead]
The "real-time" version looks awful with constantly shifting colors, inconsistently sized objects, and changing interpretations of the underlying data, resulting in what I would consider an unplayable game vs the original ASCII rendering.
The "better" version renders at a whopping 4 seconds per frame (not frames per second) and still doesn't consistently represent the underlying data, with shifting interpretations of what each color / region represents.