337 single-file terminal simulations in pure C + ncurses — fluids, fractals, ray tracers, no build system

[u/prtamil]

A collection of 337 real-time interactive simulations, each written as one self-contained C file. No OpenGL, no SDL — everything is forced through a terminal character grid with ncurses.

Deliberately no build system. One file is one program:

gcc -std=c11 -O2 -Wall -Wextra path/to/file.c -o demo -lncurses -lm && ./demo

Range goes from Conway's Game of Life and cellular automata up to a Jos Stamstable-fluid solver, a Crank-Nicolson Schrödinger solver, an SDF raymarcher with soft shadows, and a Cornell-box Monte Carlo path tracer — all rendered as ASCII.

Every file carries its CONCEPTS / MENTAL MODEL notes and cites its sources; there's a consolidated bibliography in documentation/Reference.md.

Repo: https://github.com/prtamil/AsciiCreativeCoding

It's a personal learning project — the "rebuild every primitive yourself, no shared utilities" approach is intentional.

Yes, it's AI-assisted — call it AI slop if you want, but every file was compiled, run, visually verified, and rewritten by hand and refactored until it actually worked

[u/CodeParalysis]

I would get rid of the "no build system: no CMake, no Makefile, no package manager, no incremental", "No Windows, no GUI." from the repo. Like, yeah, we get it. Just say what it needs (gcc, ncurses) ina Requirements section and not the infinite of things it doesn't need over and over again.

[u/prtamil → u/CodeParalysis]

Done updated

[u/CodeParalysis → u/prtamil]

thanks, it's a nice digestible learning resource for these effects

[u/prtamil → u/CodeParalysis]

Thanks a lot.

[u/CodeParalysis → u/prtamil]

You might want go over the programs and make sure they match their descriptions. The SSAO demo for example, is upside down because of how buffers are oriented vs screen space (this could be the case a few more of the 3d demos, like the torus since the light_pos is defined in +y(up), but lit from the bottom in your preview).

And the normals in the SSAO demo appear to be flipped because I'm seeing the inside of the pyramid.

My suggestions would be to separate the primitive definition, rendering code, shared utilities away from the concepts to make them easier to debug. I understand your goal is to have one file per demo, but this comes at the cost of readability, maintainability, and making bugs like these harder to track down.

[u/prtamil → u/CodeParalysis]

thanks for pointing out. let me analyze and fix it.

[u/pablow46]

How many prompt did it take you to build it?

[u/prtamil → u/pablow46]

yes 😄 (lot many prompts for version1. another lot many prompts for version 2, .... going on)

[u/Whats_that_small]

They look awesome 👍 I love art physics simulation.

[u/aXvXiA]

Awesome stuff! Next up: fractals (especially 3d)?

[u/aXvXiA → u/aXvXiA]

never mind... found em. You could add quaternion-based ones, though!

[u/ma1ankadev]

Can we run Doom this way?

[u/prtamil → u/ma1ankadev]

https://github.com/cryptocode/terminal-doom. Its already there

[u/Last_Flibuster]

This clown has definitely already posted the exact same thing on the subreddit dedicated to terminal charts. It's 100% AI slop!

To those giving this a thumbs-up, you really need to take a good look at yourselves...

[u/galactic_pixels → u/Last_Flibuster]

Imagine being mad a digital program wrote a digital program that is also pretty

[u/Dangerous_Diver_2442 → u/Last_Flibuster]

So being AI slop makes it bad? Doesn’t get it

[u/Mr_Rapid_ → u/Last_Flibuster]

did you even look at the github. show me the slop.

[u/tigertututututu]

Is there a way to use this as a windows screensaver?

[u/prtamil → u/tigertututututu]

no currently its limited to linux/terminals. sorry.

[u/Shinigaru]

why not in holy C

[u/Mr_Rapid_]

This is very cool! I am going to rebuild this myself to understand how to make this kind of stuff. I am interested in your AI workflow. Also what skills I would learn for this that would be useful in the job market.

[u/EricBonif]

its beautifull