This is cool... But I feel like having different color/brightness for each symbol kinda defeats the purpose of it being ASCII when the symbols only correspond to different intensities anyway.
Neat. It'd be more "ASCII" if it used 8x16 pixel (but right extended to 9x16) characters in 9:10 aspect ratio since 80x25 characters at 720x400 on 4:3 becomes 9:10. An arbitrary sized canvas is cool so long as the aspect ratio is preserved.
Just throwing a HELL YES <with a kung fu punch> out there for this. Nice work. I've been trying to integrate a live ascii video feature for a while now and the subtle detail on this is really inspiring.
https://post-processing.tresjs.org/guide/pmndrs/ascii
https://forum.babylonjs.com/t/ascii-shader-using-glsl-postpr...
https://threejs.org/examples/?q=ascii#webgl_effects_ascii
https://fwdapps.net/l/asci/
https://codesandbox.io/p/sandbox/ascii-postprocessing-n628p8...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxeRcnLr0ko
and the code: https://github.com/kristopolous/ascsee
I just updated it so it compiles on modern systems.
I also found the original version if you like being an archaeologist: https://9ol.es/tmp/gol.c